Rebelward Without a Cause
by goldenmeadow
Summary: Outtakes from Dead Confederates featuring our fave dirty beautiful vampire, Rebelward. AND other Dead Confed characters explored-Alice, Jazz, Mama Brown, Rose and more. Beautiful, scary, sexy stuff. AU, M.
1. Rebelward Without a Cause

**Rebelward Without a Cause**

**A/N: This is just for fun, that goes without saying, **_**but just in case**_**, take this with a huge GRAIN OF SALT!**

**We considered having V interview Eddie (I know she just wanted to be alone in a locked room with him), but Eddie insisted. He's a **_**big boy**_** and all that (**_**aren't you just!**_**). Sorry V, I know you were looking forward to it, but I can't have you tiring the boy out; he's got a fuck lot of work to do. Maybe next time? **

**V: **_**You know that if I was in there, no talking would have taken place, therefore we would have no outtake. Good call.**_

**This is for Eddie's girls! Y'all know who you are.**

**The long italicized passages are quotes from Dead Confederates.**

**Eddie: **_**Jesus H. Christ, Rie! Do you think you can shut it long enough for me to have my say?**_

"**Sorry, yeah. You're rubbing off on me."**

**Eddie: **_**You fuckin' wish.**_

"**Why you sonuva-"**

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Let's get right down to business, shall we?

I don't do _bridal-style__**. **_First of all, if I were to carry Bella, it'd be more along the lines of _Neanderthal_-style or, even better, with her legs wrapped around my waist so that her gash nestled nicely with my cock. I might even go so far as to pick her up by placing my arms under the crook of her knees. But why I gotta' carry her all over the place anyway? She's got legs for fuck's sake; let her use 'em!

Furthermore, I wouldn't be caught dead, _ha!_, in a Volvo! You fuckin' taking this piss? Could there be a more namby-pamby ride? Why do you have to keep doing that to me? Yes, yes, I know, _"But SM said-"_ blah blah blah. She's a _mom_ and a Mormon to boot; what the hell does that tell you? Cut this venomous vampire some slack, y'all. FUCKIN' A, can we get a bit more creative?

Oh no and Hell No, nobody better give me any more shit about Chevys. _My old school Ford Bronco defines me, complete with a faded and torn bumper sticker that reads 'You should see my other ride', referring to my Ford F2500HD. The beast that spoiled the shit out of tires that reached Emmett's linebacker shoulders, mud-splattered splash guards revealing the superb silhouette of a buxom woman reclining and jutting her perky tits out, gun rack jauntily stacked across the rear window, truck bed filled with the debris of our scandalous nights._

While I love my monster, tricked-out trucks, I am pretty fucking sick of my asinine quirks. _Any day now I was going to scalp myself with my incessant hair-raking, blind myself from my interminable beating off, or break my nose so that it resembled Bubba's busted-up promontory with my guilty, confused, frustrated pinching. FUCK'S SAKE, so very fucking tired. I needed to get some new tics. Or just shut the bitch outta' my head completely forever!__Pinching.__Pinching and rolling and forever pitching a tent at the mere thought of_…_Bella._

'P' popping grates on my very last nerve. What the fuck is up with that? What self-possessing vampire would ever _pop_ a _'p'_? Just don't go there; you'll only succeed in pissing me off further!

Moving on, you wanna' know how come we can live in the South what with the blasting sunshine and all? Thought I'd made that abundantly clear already, but…_ My glistening skin only the byproduct of this deliciously hot climate and the alcohol. A little sun never friggin' hurt anyone. Dazzling was a pussy word anyway. What were we? Chicks with dicks? Naw. I preferred the phrase "sweaty sheen". I'm a man, therefore I sweat. Fucking deal._

Oh fuck me, here's a good one. What do I do with my spare time, seeing as I don't sleep and all and have no obvious occupation? Ha! I ain't a surgeon, lawyer, CEO. I sure as fuck am not a Dom; you would certainly never catch me dead as Sub. Fuck college, I'm no over-achiever and I'm too friggin' smart for my own good anyway. And truthfully? I could give a fuck. Not a roadie, a rockstar – _I'm a goddamned Cockstar!_ – not a pornstar, though you never know. Least that has potential for pussy. Hey, Hef, give me a call!

So, in a word, there will be no flailing, no bondage – _lest Bella begs_ – no sex swing, though I might could do her on a junkyard tire swing, if that would suit.

But what do I actually _do_? Fuck, y'all are persistent! _Christ._ All right! I jag off. I stalk Bella. I drink and hunt and fuck around with Jazz and Em. And I read, a lot. _Having a healthy dedication to all things JK Rowling, what the fuck else am I going to do with unlimited time but read a rousing good YA fantasy? Now, vampire fiction…that has me snorting just like Emmett in hog heaven. _Highbrow and lowbrow, I am into all _ships_. I'll read it all from Harlequin (why the fuck not? If nothing else, it's snigger-worthy), to the classics, contemporary fiction, and a veritable plethora of porn. 'S'all good.

What now? You wanna' know about fanfiction? Do I read it? 'Course I do! I have my top picks, but I'm not gonna' talk about 'em here. Don't want to cause a bitch-fight and all, know what I mean?

It goes without saying that I do not mind my '_p's and 'q's,_ as Maw Esme likes to say. Cussing is my favorite pastime. _Fuck and cunt_ are choice, _dickwad_, _twat features_ and _pud-whacker _also rate. I don't even care if Esme shanks me every time she hears me swearing. And tell you what, that shit is like a wrecking ball to the back of my brain! _Heard that, did'ya, Esme?_ Fuck! Can't catch a cunting break!

Now I know you've all seen me skulking around Twitter. What the motherfuck, you ask? When just last Friday I was spouting off about _a pseudo-intellectual, circle jerk of Jesus-sandal wearing pansies who__were deconstructing the pop culture genius of Tarantino while tweeting on their combustible iPhones. Tweet-tards. What a fucking palaver._ Yeah, okay okay, you fuckin' found me out! I _tweet_! What can I say? Got me a hot-ass bunch of hoors over there that like to stroke my…_ego._ Can't just say no, can I? Thought not.

Back to chapping the chub, jerking my junk, beating my beef, tugging my tackle…I do it incessantly on account of _I ain't gettin' any good lovin' because of some irritatingly beautiful brunette at Mama Brown's who is making my balls turn an unsightly shade of blue. Not my style, at all. I want to rip her head from her shoulders, spit in her face, slap her ass, suck her empty, and fuck her six ways to Sunday all at the same time.__ Shit. I ain't afraid to admit it. My balls are aching, wound tighter than a…__ah, Christ, just wound tight, okay?_

Which brings me to panties, knickers, thongs, and cheekies; lacy, silky, sexy undergarments. _Oh hell._ Contrary to popular belief, I neither sniff, lick, nor steal them! In fact, let's get straight to the point; I'm not all that fond of Bella in midnight blue. To be brutally honest, it brings out the sallow undertones of her flesh. Put her in soft yellow, sweet pink, slate blue, ivory, and the creamy perfection of her tits and shoulders, her pliable thighs and…_oh fuck my life, here I go again!_

Let's just git it over with. No one _milks my shaft._ I am not a cow; my dick is not an udder. I ejaculate poison, not fucking dairy products!

Now, one thing you fine ladies got right? I am hung like a horse. Well-endowed. And I know how to use it for a _slow, long, and hard fuck._ Mortal men seem incapable of SLHF. I don't really understand the cuntnundrum! I love to fuck, it's second best to muff diving. _Mmmmm_, poontang.

While we're in the bedroom, I just gotta' say that not all that many women know how to deep throat. _Show of hands_, ladies, don't be shy! _Uh huh, 's'what I thought._ That particular _maneuver _takes talent and practice and innate skill. Quite simply, not everyone is capable. _Hmmm, I wonder if Bella can…_

_Sorry_. I can hold it together, I'm almost done.

What's with _trying to create friction_? Seriously. Rubbing your thighs together, seeking _friction_. Why? Just fuck already. I've never seen a woman _trying to create friction_. And if'n I did, I'd be wondering why she was scratching her legs together like a grasshopper, creating shrill song.

As for Bella, well, she's not all about Austen and Bronte. _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ is one of her well-thumbed through paperbacks, as is Nin's _Little Birds. _She's a complex woman, multi-dimensional, why else would I be so enthralled? Now don't get me started on the taxidermy, because that's what got me into this mess in the first place!

FYI, Bella's not all that fond of mushrooms, too many plates of the fungi ravioli. So fuck off with the risotto, mushroom pizza, omelets, etc.

And she's not even that klutzy. Give the girl some credit! She's not going to face-plant if I'm not there to immediately catch her**.**

Does she smell like strawberries? Does she ever. I'll give you that, and it makes me want to suck/fuck her even more ludicrously, lasciviously. She's driving me to drink! And dink-off. Which is pretty fackin' _bizarro,_ considering the mere thought of food makes me nauseous!

Back to me, because y'all are on my time. I'm broody but wickedly irreverent. I think a lot. And when I fuckin' talk, my words count. You will listen; you will wait patiently until I deem you worthy of my conversation. You will not fuckin' complain.

Music is vital to my existence. Classical music in particular has its place, but please don't make me listen to _Claire de Lune _One. More. Time. There's so much more out there! _2008 was my favorite fucking rock year of all time! With new blistering albums from Guns n' Roses, AC/DC, and Metallica, I was nearly creaming in my jeans during Rocktober! It almost rivaled the hardcore 80's; Tesla, Whitesnake, Quiet Riot, Alice Cooper, Megadeath – if only they knew-- and the ilk, man I missed those days! Live and Let Die. Indeed._

With respect to My Morning Jacket, how could I have slagged them off one chapter and then have _Evil Urges_? Fuck. Caught red-handed. What can I say? I am guilty of judging a book by its Jesus Pubes Bearded cover. I listened. I liked. I repented. The bastards are all excessive wicked, evil grim lethal sexy tendencies, and y'all know I am all about that.

Now, I can't believe one of you _readers_ out there actually had the audacity to suggest that I would go all Deliverance before I even made my appearance (and to slag off Rie's _Comeuppance_ in the same breath…_shame on you_)! I'm no rapist, not of women or men! I'm just a good ol' boy with a twist. Jazz is the reformed EOF, Equal Opps Fucker. _If it had a hole, he had the pole, and he enjoyed nothing more than dipping it in, bobbing it, and reeling that shit in._ Even so, not one of us would ever force our intentions upon another being. Get that shit straight.

So y'all wanna' know what the deal is with Alice. _Who the Fuck is Alice?_ And the Volturi? _They craved to get their long-taloned, gauzily-fleshed fingers on me and into my mind, who didn't? Aro, Caius, and Marcus, the triad of evil, the Brothers Grimm of the vampire underworld, wanted to enslave me. I was nobody's bitch, I didn't give a toss if they were undead royalty or not! _

Piss off. I'm not touching that with my yardarm of a cock. Rie would lock me up in the safe-room and besides, the mere thought of _her_ -- _the telepathic psychic thief, the premonitive purloiner, the crystal ball toting gypsy talented with the sleight of hand…_ _little Miss Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_..._ Bats in her Belfry -- _and_ them, _fucking tissue-paper-skinned legions of death, makes my skin shiver and my dick shrivel, and we can't have that now can we?

Will there be any other POV's? Possibly, though Rie doesn't want to ruin the _integrity_ of the story…_who the fuck's she kidding?_

Finally, I've heard that some of you appreciative readers are a tidge apprehensive about the appearance of Jake. Well, hell. You and me both! Fucking bad juju wolf is _the very worst kind of voodoo monster. Fuck chlorofluorocarbons, the beast's reek alone was single-handedly causing a gaping hole in the ozone!_ Wish I knew what the crap was going on with him and Bella because it's tossing my unyielding _insides _out!

So, if you're wondering what all the fuss is about, and you should be, toddle your asses over to Dead Confederates (that's me, Bubba, and Jazz). Review proper-like and you will rewarded.

If'n you're after the quick fix McFic to match your McMansion, don't come knocking on my double-wide. If you want a slow paced, southern story with me in all my glory, I will treat you to my wit, slivers of my Johnnie Dead Reb untiring body, and facking pages worthy of _uhnnnn_ and throaty laughs. And y'all know I'm trying my damndest to put out!

You like this, come visit my broads on The Dead thread at Twilighted.

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**A/N: Um, thank you, Eddie. That was very…**_**enlightening.**_** Baby, Esme's gonna' have your ass on a busted-up tea tray from Page's Thieves' Market! You might want to tone it down on occasion. **

**Rebelward wants to thank all reviewers with another chapter of Dead Confederates. But he's telling me to wait until we reach 100 reviews for the shit we've already spewed out first. Not sure who holds the reins here…**

**Eddie: O**_**h yeah, side saddle anybody?**_

**Fuck, Eddie, cut that crap out! **

**Eddie: **_**What about Bucking Bronco?**_

**Oh my fuck, it's going to be a long night. But ah'm not complaining. **

**Last call, go vote for your fave authors: The Bellies, ****www(DOT)thecatt(DOT)net/, ****voting starts July 15th and The Indies, ****theindietwificawards(DOT)com/, ****voting is July 6****th**** – 13****th****. I believe the noms for both should be announced today!**


	2. Interview with a Vile Vampire

**Interview with a Virile Vampire**

**A/N: This is all V with loads of special Eddie flourishes c/o of moi, call it a collaboration if you must. The pillaging of Green Eggs and Ham, that's all Eddie ;). Enjoy. And you can look forward to guest appearances from my favorite authors in new POV's soon. Worry not, Eddie will always be mine, and I will be keeping his POV all to my devious self.**

**V, loves you hard, BB. And thank you for putting yourself out there; it's been fun **_**playing**_** with you! MWAH!**

**Note from V: Ok, so this took a lot for me to write…the pretty (FILTHY) words are all Rie, but the base is mine…I hope you like it!! Italicized things in my lines when speaking with Eddie are my thoughts. **

**INDIES: Voting starts today (07/22) at 9 pm ET and ends 07/26. Dead Confederates is up for four awards, and Comeuppance for three! All relevant details, links, etc. are on my profile. Please vote for your fave underdog authors; we little people need love too.**

**Disclaimer: Need I really say it again. Twilight, not mine. Rebelward, all mine.**

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I am sitting at my desk, making sure everything is ready for my interview with Eddie. I still can't believe that he agreed to do it, knowing what Rie has told him about my propensity to, *ahem*, _careen off track_. Seriously though, who could blame me? Eddie brings out the dirty in many a woman, not the least of which is _yours truly_. Who can resist the ass-hugging jeans, shit-kicker boots, pec-defining V-neck t-shirt, and the perpetual Sex Hair? Yes, _Sex Hair_, because the first thing that pops into one's mind when looking at it is, "Who the hell did he just fuck?" But I digress.

I've got my questions lined up, though who knows if I'll be able to complete them all as I turn all _special_ when Eddie's around. I'll be lucky if I get through the first two notes before starting with the innuendos. I will try to be strong. I know you all are counting on me to get these answers. These are serious, thought-provoking, life-changing….._aw, fuck it_. Who am I kidding? Looking at these questions, I realized three things: It's all about sex, has _always_ _been_ about sex, always _will be_ about sex.

The clock ticking reminds me that it is almost time to _(seduce) _meet with Eddie, so I try to finish up what I'm doing. I've had a rough morning, having to actually work and all, so I've got my feet up on my desk, crossed at the ankles. I never did take off my stilettos, but motherfuckinghell, they hurt like a bitch, so I'll be removing them shortly…_as part of the striptease._ A buzz at the door alerts me to my next appointment, so I hit the little button under my desk to release the catch and let Eddie in. _Let the games begin!_

**Vanessa**: Well, good afternoon Eddie.

**Eddie**: What the fuck's with the buzzer? Trying to keep certain people out?

**V:** Um, well, more like keeping a certain person _in._

**E:** _Uh-huh_. Do I need to call Rie now? Jeeesus, V. I thought we could at least go a couple of rounds before you launched yourself across the desk at me. Yes yes, you've heard all about my yardarm cock and my SLHF talents, but I swear to fuck that if you start _pooling in yer panties_, I am outta' here!

_I shift uneasily under Eddie's throwdown while Eddie continues: _So, are you ready for me?

**V**, _quickly recovering_: Baby, I'm always ready for you. Have a seat. _Damn, didn't even make it to the first question before falling into impropriety. Rie's gonna' kill me._

**E:** Oh-kaay. I hope the ladies came up with some good questions for me because I'm in a talkative mood for a change, and I'm sick to death of all the yammering from Jazz about Bats in her Belfry and Bubba with his ceaseless brain droolin' over Rose's glory mound. I need a diversion and some good company.

**V:** If it's diversion you're after, perhaps we could just skip the interview part of this little tête-à-tête and get down to the naughty gritty…FUCK. _Titty gritty. _SHIT. NITTY GRITTY! Crap. Um, yeah…back to the questions at hand. Well, _hmmm_, 'good' is a subjective word…I will say that their questions are very worthwhile. _In some freaky minds…mine included. _

_Not even bothering to contain his scandalous smirk, Eddie combined it with a raised eyebrow before saving me from complete mortification_: Then let's get it on, shall we?

**V:** Indeed, let's. _I slowly swing my left leg up and down from the desk, followed by the right, which I like to believe was a very sexy move. Shut up. _

**V:** I'm going to get comfortable, if you don't mind. This might take a while.

**E:** Go right ahead. I'd never deny a lady the right to be _comfortable_ when I'm interacting with her_._

**V:** _Stares at Eddie a minute. Really? Did he just say that? This is gonna be more fun than I fervently wished for. And now for my first trick…sitting down in the chair across from him, I cross and un-cross my legs, finally folding them again with the right leg over my left knee._

**E:** Did you seriously just pull a Basic Instinct?

**V:** That depends. Did you notice that I'm wearing panties?

**E:** Maybe.

**V:** Then you can't refer to me as Sharon Stone. I do need to keep _some_ dignity. _For however short a time that may be…_

**V:** So, up first, we've got a query from AmeryMarie. She tweeted you a couple questions—

**E:** Tweeted? Dammit, I knew that would come back to haunt me…

**V:** _Shoots Eddie a look that would turn him to marble, if he wasn't already._

**E:** Sorry, do please continue.

**V:** Thank you. So, I'm just going to get this one out of the way. She wants to know if you'll marry her.

**E:** _Stony silence coupled with a glare. _

**V:** Right. I'm gonna take that as a 'no'. I told her it wouldn't be a good question, but whatever. She had another couple too. How about this one: What is so alluring about Bella?

_Without hesitation, he takes the bait: _Firstly, there's her blood and the vicious call of that hot liquid that throbs through her blue veins, crawling like a map beneath the creamy pale sheen of her skin. The only one whose life I want to take with such disgusting desire, Bella compels me to stomp down the demon that would have me kill her and drink her dry! Then there's the way she blocks others out, and I suspect it's not just me, even though_ I_ seem to have this disability around her alone. And yet she is open and unguarded in her actions towards me, leaving just her mind the unturned stone between us. The broken bits of her are part of who she is and not something she hides or denies or runs from. Brazen, ballsy, fucking gloriously beautiful! She intrigues and mystifies me, which, after more than a century of mind-numbing boredom and monotony, is fucking incredible! The only color I see is Bella. And she is a rainbow after a quick abundant rainstorm.

**V:** _I looked at Eddie with disbelief written across my face. I am stunned by the depths of his feelings that he tries so hard to hide._

**E:** _What?_ Fuck. Yeah, and she's got the most horny tits, high and rounded and soft as they push against my chest while we danced, and against my solid back when I drove her away from the Kick'n Horse Saloon on the rear of my bike. A luscious ass that begs to be grabbed, caressed, licked. And her legs. Oh hell, I can just about feel those long, lithe legs wrapped around my neck while I--

**V:** Okay, we get the picture! Shit, when you put it that way, it fills me with ideas about batting for the other team. Should've bought the t-shirt, "Instant Lesbian, Just Add Alcohol"!

**E:** _By the glazed look in his half-mast, suddenly jet eyes and the way he shifts erotically in his seat, pulling my attention straight to the straining button fly of his tattered jeans, he's obviously allowed a fantasy to begin in his mind._

**V:** Big boy, we'll have time for role-play later. Moving. On. AmeryMarie had one more question: Why does Malice bother you so much?

**E:** Damn it all to Hell! Can we just not do this now? I can't talk about _her_. I don't even want to talk about _her._ I swear to fuck I said the same damn thing in my previous Rebelward rant. Same rules apply. You will get no more from me on Malice than what you are reading in DC's. Drop it like a _Bad Habit_.

**V:** All right, _all right_, dude. Its okay, I know it will come out eventually in the story and that you're bound by Rie's edicts regarding what you can and cannot say about certain matters. Dayum, Eddie, what with Rie's ever-loving haranguing and Bella-induced blue balls, you're wound tighter than half the women begging for entrance into the DW!

**E:** You ain't just whistlin' Dixie, V. Speaking of, if you don't mind, there are few things I'd like to address.

_Chewing on my inner cheek, I hold back a grin_: Go on then.

**E:** What is with deal with me inevitably "releasing in three long spurts"? Why three? Where did that cum from? I can assure you it takes longer than three pathetic squirts to empty myself, if you know what I mean. More like four, five, or six. And Rie has a few things she'd like me to point out. It seems there's been a complaint that I say _minge, cunt, pussy, muff diving, _etc. too often and that the rating should be upped. So I ask you, what about _chalupa_? Huh? Does that pass the PG-13 'you shouldn't be fucking reading this' test?

**V:** _I barely bit off my grin and shook my head from side to side, my eyes dancing at his outburst._

**E:** Oh. Well, fuck it. Anal retriever? Carpet muncher, pussy poontang, snatch, cocksword…I could do this all fuckin' day. But whatthefuckever. Also, stereotypes? DC's is nothing but stereotypes? You shittin' me? You're a Yankee, aren't you? Go on, stay north of my territory and you'll be all right.

**V:** I feel you, _ahem, __feel for you_,Eddie. So, next question then? Okay. Gasaway Alley asks and I quote, "How long is Little Eddie, your long schlong, Donkey Kong?" I would have worded it a bit more tactfully, but you know April.

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E:** Yeah, I like her. She's one perverted momma. April, let me address you personally; it's long enough to fill whatever hole I deign to stick it in. Oh wait, no that's Jazz, the EOF. To answer, I've never measured my pole, so I can't give exact dimens---

_I mentally fist-pump into the air and jump all over that_: Um, I'll help you with that…all in the name of journalism and, _um, _science? Not a problem. Let me just find the yardstick!

_Waggling his ludicrously luscious, lickable eyebrows Eddie halts me_: Hold up there, V, we'll see about that_._ _But_, I can add that while many people like to say, "It's not the size that counts, it's what you do with it," I beg to differ. Do I know what to do with it? Of course I do, to the highest superhuman standards. But it certainly helps that my cock is above average. I'm gonna' put it simply so that all you mortal women can understand exactly what I'm saying: If I had to buy condoms, I'd buy Magnums. But don't get me wrong, it isn't circus-sideshow-worthy, just a bit _larger than life_, like the rest of me.

_And the smooth, dirty motherfucker winks at me! Trying to catch my breath at the visual he clearly intended to splash across my gasping mind, I continue while pretending not to pant like a bitch in heat_: l thank you for that _thorough_ answer.

**E:** When it comes to my cock, I don't dick around.

_Momentarily stunned afresh by the word 'cock' out of Eddie's beautiful mouth, I manage to pull it together. _ _Barely_:Ok, next question. Still from the same lady, and I use that term loosely: Coke or Pepsi? Southern Comfort or Jack? Patron or Cuervo? Silver or Gold? Goose or Stoli?

**E:** Coke. Aren't they all Cokes down here? SoCo. When tequila comes a'knockin', it's always Mr. Cuervo, Gold. And I'm thinking Stoli. They have kick-ass T-shirts.

**V:** _Phew, _that was an easy one! Now I know what to bring when I come visiting. Jewels wants to know this: What is your view of people who put leashes on their children?

**E:** They have leashes for kids? Hmmm. _Brilliant idea!_ Do they make them in Roaming Gnome size for Fagin Fingers Alice? I might could do with one of those, especially with the pixie tricks she's got up her gothic sleeves in the next chapter! Myself, well I'd go for cages and muzzles, but leashes will do in a public setting, I suppose. Never said I was the fatherly type. _He visibly shivers at the thought of himself with kids._

**V:** Jewels had another one: What is your favorite location for sexy times?

**E:** I think Dr. Seuss said it best:

_Do I like great tits and gams?_

_Fuck yes, I like them, Sam-I-am!_

_Would you like them here or there?_

_I would like them _

_here or there._

_I would like them_

_anywhere._

_Would I like it _

_in a house?_

_Would I like it _

_in her mouth?_

_I do like fucking _

_in my house._

_I would like my cock_

_in her mouth!_

_Would I eat snatch_

_in a bed?_

_Would I eat her pussy_

_while she gave me head?_

_Yes in a bed,_

_Yes with my cock._

_In my trailer_

_with her cunt barer._

_I would eat pussy here and there._

_I would eat it anywhere._

_I would lick great tits and gams._

_I do like them, Sam-I-am._

_Would I? Could I?_

_In a car?_

_Eat it! Eat it!_

_Here it is._

_Hell yes, I would._

_Fuck yes, I could._

_In her mouth, _

_she's not a mouse,_

_in my Bronco,_

_on an airboat,_

_over my straightback piano._

_Yeah, I'd fuck Bella anywhere!_

_A bit speechless after getting explicit visuals from his descriptions, it's my turn to shift in my chair!_: You're quite the poet…._shew_, piano, yeah the bareback…right, _fuck_. I know you said that shit to distract me. Stop. It isn't working. Okay, Mer actually has some good questions here…Do you still play your piano? If not, do you miss it?

**E:** I do still play my upright, but after Bubba went all _Great Balls of Fire _on it, leaving his behemoth ass dent in my stool and wet rings soaked into the wood casing from his Schlitz can, I had to move it to my bedroom. Now, do I go all pansy-ass and longing over it? Fuck no; leave that melancholic bullshit to uptight SullenCullen. 'Sides, little known fact, Esme likes to cut a rug!

**V:** Ooh, this is my fave question from Mer: Would you drain my worthless husband?

**E:** Since you know I have recently imbibed human blood, I could say _yes_. If you really begged and put it to me in such a way that I couldn't refuse, in the irrefutable form of booze, blood and broads, I might take pity and do it. But would I actually? _Probably not._ This damn Bella thing has got me all twisted inside-out, and I think that I might actually value human life right now. Motherfuckme.

**V:** Aw, isn't that sweet??

**E:** Let's not bring it up again. Sensitive subject for me.

**V:** Right. We've got just a few more questions now…Najia wants to know whether you prefer boxers or briefs?

**E:** Boxer-briefs. I like the way they hug my junk, and they have the right amount of support without sacrificing fashion. _Fuck me hard_, I've been around Malice too long already.

**V:** Mmmmmm, boxer-briefs. Shit, did I say that out loud? Fuck. Knock it off, Smirky McSmirkerson.

**E:** _fucking smirking._

**V:** Ok, Najia also wants to know what your favorite sexual position is. _Must not listen…must finish interview…do not offer to demonstrate…keep legs closed…eyes on the prize…WHAT? NO! NO EYES ON THE PRIZE. Eyes to the floor, woman!_

**E:** I could go another round of Dr. Seuss. But I'll keep it hard and simple. Any position. Anywhere. Anytime. You want it? I can do it.

**V:** Well. Thank you for _that. _ Give me a few more details on the down-low and I could be your lap…FUCK…_lab_ partner?

**E:** Well, Bella might be a little annoyed if I took you up on that offer, V. But if Jacob a.k.a Anubis doesn't stop sniffing around, I might give it consideration.

**V:** Moving on, RowanMoon has the last queries of the day for you: What do you think of the ladies of the Bad, Broken, and Dead threads? And where would you take us on a date?

**E:** I hear you fine sexy ladies are all about circle-jerks and junkfests? I admit to perusing the Dead Thread. Better than damn daytime telly! Your minds are gorgeous little trinkets of poetry and pure rubble. Knee deep in filth, y'all are. How you women manage to sometimes spin it into the most sinful subjugation of images and words is beyond me. And there's more than a handful of esteemed writers hanging about, hopefully we will hear more from them during the upcoming guest spots on Rebelward Without a Cause. A date. Like a menagerie of the granddames et moi? All for my taking? From what I've heard from Rie's incessant warbling, we would just need booze, music, and the good company of The Commune that is Bad, Broken, and Dead. There would be no mushroom ravioli, though there might be 'shrooms. Alcohol would be in abundance. A roaring fire to offset the brightness of starlight. No specific venue, ladies. Just come join me in the _lowest_ of lowcountries. I am at your disposal.

**V:** Damn you are such a smooth talker. _Turns up volume on the iDock._

**E:** Um, is that Disco Stick playing?

**V:** Yes. Yes it is. Just setting the mood for the rest of this conversation…the interview portion that will be available for public consumption is now over. _Song changes into NIN Closer._

**E:** I think I know where this is going. Can't say I disapprove.

**V:** Now that is what I like to hear. _Even if you disapproved, I'd change your mind. _Why are you grinning? Did I say something odd? That wasn't even…._ooooooh_. Fuck. I just remembered that you can read my mind…_HOLY FUCKING SHITBALLS_! You heard everything? The whole ti-

**E:** _The smirk turns into acknowledgment in the form of full-on laughing, complete with stomach-grabbing and rolling around on the floor. _

**V:** Dammit all to Hell. Interview over.

* * *

**A/N: So give some love to V (**_**yes yes, and you too Eddie!**_**). She's a nervous wreck. Not only about having to interview our boy, but to completely fuckin' forget through the entire interrogation that he was simply eating his way through her thoughts! Needless to say, she is the slightest bit horrified. Especially when she read back through the transcript.**

**There there, V. Eddie was very much amused, and maybe even a bit **_**tittylated**_**.**

**Next up is the Alice, the **_**telepathic psychic thief,**_** by my friend, RowanMoon. She writes **_**Broken Doll**_**, and you can find it on Twilighted. I am incredibly excited to see what she does with dear Malice!**

**By all means, off you go to Dead Confederates if this was your first stop. Read it, review it, let Eddie know what you think.**


	3. Seeking Asylum

You absolutely must read chapter seven of DC's, _Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, _before this. If you don't Eddie will have your hide. _Eh, never mind, y'all would like that far too much. Will have to think of a better punishment._

As always, thank you V for your brilliant beta-ry!

This is from my beautiful friend Kari, (RowanMoon). I hope you're _scurred_.

* * *

**Seeking Asylum**

Mary Alice Brandon was a ghost between worlds, slipping in and out of the veil of Time. Oblivious to her past and occasionally blinded within her present by the opalescent flickering glances of the future, she skulked along the edges of sanity, belonging nowhere except with_ him._ This she knew her whole life, and even though this knowledge was stolen from her during her cross over to immortality, true love has no boundaries. It only requires patience.

Patience was never granted to Alice in her human life. Nor was compassion. Only fear, suspicion and loneliness.

~//~

Born into a family of moderate social standing in Biloxi, Mississippi, it was disturbingly evident at an early age that she was not a normal child, proving time and time again to be an embarrassment if not a fright to her parents. Her very birth should have held enough portent for her parents to realize that. Mary Alice was never destined be the perfect child that was to be part and parcel of their perfect life.

On a cool October morning, Mr. Brandon was stirred awake by his manservant stating that a murder of crows had infested the local grounds and his assistance was needed to clear this large gathering of birds from the area. Dressing hastily and running downstairs to inspect the situation, the gravelly choir of caws could be heard before he even opened the main door of the house. The black winged beasts were everywhere; amongst the leaf-barren trees in ebony clumps, hopping along the ground, crowding upon the roofs of the house and stables. The superstitious servants sibilated amongst themselves on the macabre oddity of this gathering of the ominous birds; some believed it to be a sign of death come knocking upon their master's door.

All morning long, the ear-splitting crack and boom of gunfire could be heard throughout the estate, shaking the windows and whipping Mrs. Brandon's nerves into a frenzy. The lady of the house was eight months pregnant and confined to bed rest as it had been a difficult pregnancy, laden with blinding headaches and cramping.

At 11:11, a large monster of a crow beat its great wings against the picture window of her private chambers, as if it was demanding entrance. Her husband, being an accomplished marksman, shot the foul beast. It exploded, spattering against the window a gory display of innards, bone, and feathers from the rending devastation of buckshot before the delicate young mistress's very eyes. The labor pains began shortly thereafter. So stirred from fright, she let loose with a murderous screech that resounded through the house, pleading for her maid to ring for the doctor immediately.

The pulsing paroxysms of pain during the delivery were beyond anything Mrs. Brandon had ever felt in all of her nineteen years. Her screams permeated every room in the house and even reached outside to mingle with the din of gunfire and the scratchy talons of bird calls. Begging the doctor to just let her die, she was utterly certain that she would come to her end before the bairn was born. The torment of her untold months with child was nothing compared to this bodily torture. The old doctor wiped the sweat from his brow and calmly told the delirious woman that all would be well, that she must quiet herself as fear and hysterics was not conducive to her present condition. With that, she told the doctor to go straight to hell, causing the pedestrian peddler--with his black bag full of noxious vials that did nothing to salve her pain--to chuckle softly to himself, advising the vexed madam that her baby's head was now crowning.

A gasp amongst the attending maids broke amongst the grunts, groans and loose lipped expletives of their mistress when they noticed that the caul was completely covering the child's face. Whispers of this auspicious augury pointing to the child having the power of Sight rippled amongst the women in the room. The doctor frowned at the old wives-tales beating at his ears, clearing the newborn's face of the offending piece of amnion so that it could take it's first gasping breath. With the sound of the child's shrieking squall filling the room, her mother smiled meekly, uttering thanks to the God she had only moments before blasphemed with pain-soaked profanities.

A few days later, Mrs. Brandon and her new daughter were called upon by her widowed mother-in-law. Bedecked from head to toe in her stiff, outdated, black Victorian finery, Mrs. Brandon, Sr. was ever the woman in mourning since the passing of her husband twenty years prior. The black taffeta of her long skirt swished against the bassinet, waking wee whey Alice from her slumber. Leaning over to take a closer look at the child, the matriarch turned up her nose in disgust, questioning her daughter-in-law on the conical shape of the child's head and her odd elfish features. The young mother repeated back what the doctor had told her, that the shape of the child's head would go back to normal eventually and was formed as such due to her small birth canal, and that her fine features were a result of being premature. With a "_harrumph_" and a disdainful sigh, the old witch stated that the child was a Changeling, left by the fairies in place of the pretty baby girl they should have had. As if in direct challenge to the old dame's utterances, Alice bellowed balefully, spewing her mother's breast milk all over her grandmother's blouse. Mrs. Brandon could have sworn her newborn daughter laughed as her mother-in-law left in a disgusted huff. A chill crawled over her body at the thought.

~//~

The onset of Alice's visions was brutal and violent in her early human years. The vessel of her tiny mortal body was too weak to handle the vibrations sent from the infinite outcomes funneling down and projected by a singular choice, extracted from a myriad of impulses. Leaving her frail and weak, the delicate child was prone to spastic seizures and cataclysmic convulsions.

The seizures, before she was verbal, would leave tiny Alice in a terrible, inconsolable state. Crying for hours until her exasperated mother would hand her over to the nursemaid in tears of her own, shutting herself up in her room for days on end. Alice's mother never bonded with the child, harboring much resentment toward her frequent bouts of caterwauling. When Mary Alice began to talk, the announcements of company before they actually came calling, spoken from her cherubic bowed mouth, would make her mother faint and her father wonder in bewilderment how she knew such things.

The first time they finally realized beyond a doubt her precognitive ability was upon their return from a trip to New York City. Leaving the child with the nurse, Mr. and Mrs. Brandon enjoyed their time away from the stress of having an abnormal, sickly child. Even though she did not have the bond she always yearned for in her first born daughter, Mrs. Brandon spent an afternoon picking out a new spring wardrobe for little Alice. When it came to the choice of her Easter dress and bonnet, she had a terrible time deciding between two dresses. It came down to what Alice would like herself or what would flatter the child who, truly, with her sallow skin and deadened stare, required much help in this area. The townspeople were already full of unpropitious sympathy for the Brandons and their delicate daughter.

And the Brandons were much too proud for pity.

As soon as she was old enough to walk, otherworldly Alice would turn in circles with her arms outstretched until she fell on the ground in a heaping swoon. It was one of the few times she laughed freely, giggled abundantly, as a young child should. As her motor skills improved, she tended to prefer dresses that would fan out and move with her during her whirling dervish deviations.

In New York, surrounded by choices and ideas of what would cause her diametrically opposite daughter herself to jump up and down in unlikely feverish excitement , Mrs. Brandon considered the selection. There was a lime fresh dress with a flouncy, full crinoline that caught her mother's eye, screaming "Alice" to her. Ever conscious of outward appearances, Mrs. Brandon concluded the color would not do at all...it would wash her daughter out and make her look ghoulish. Choosing an understated deep rose dress, she was satisfied that her purchase would do what it could for Alice's pallid complexion. It was about time to put a stop to the child's habitof losing herself in her autistic orbiting so it was decided that it was best not to indulge and enable the child any further in this behavior.

Upon presentation of the new dress to a sullen, silent Alice, Mrs. Brandon chastised the child for her indifference and rude ungracious behavior. Alice stomped her tiny foot and crossed her arms in front of her, diffidently, dissonantly declaring,

"Mother, you _knew _I would have liked the green dress more!"

Alice's mother turned a ghastly of sickness that would rival the dress her daughter had wanted, leaving the room in a flash fire of burning denial and finding within its ashes acceptance of her daughter's dastardly gift.

~//~

Due to the frequent ferment of her seizures, Alice spent the majority of her childhood inside and under constant supervision. She would ignore the nuisance of the constant hovering presences by doing absorbing independent activities like puzzles, reading, or drawing. At the age of twelve, Alice devoted hours to drawing and coloring vivid pictures. Her burgeoning talent was incontestable. Mostly they were of very beautiful pale people, always with strange golden eyes. It was the drawings of beings with red eyes that made Mrs. Brandon wring her hands in worry. Two maids quit due to Alice's diresome drawings, both running and screaming down the cascading grand staircase and out the front door.

The macabre scenes were shocking in their graphic carnage!

Dead confederates_,_ bathed in blood, some burning within great pyres of fire, others torn to pieces and strewn about like broken dolls. Always at the center of the fray, the same tall, tow-headed man with crescent shaped bite marks all over his body. These drawings disturbed her parents enough to bring it to the attention of the family doctor, for which he prescribed opium along with a diagnosis of acute psychosis.

Months would pass in a drugged-out, immured haze. Finally Alice began to hide her pills, or spit them out after her mother gave them to her so that she could gain back some lucidity. Falling victim to the seizures again, she suffered in silence as she needed to see the future so that she could garner some control and navigate her way to independence from the wary wardens that were her parents. The sovereignty she craved--and would finally gain--was shown to her in brilliant snatches in which she would never age. Timeless. Powerful. Deadly. Honored, loved by a beautiful man and his immortal family. Countless scenarios afforded her only one ticket to get there.

Destiny loomed as she punched her ticket for the bus to Hell on the day of her Grandmother's 75th birthday celebration.

Slinking in and out of the crowd like a slight shadow, Alice was a mere specter among them. Mr. and Mrs. Brandon ignored their daughter as they were used to. None of her younger cousins wanted to play with her. They shrunk in fear when she came near them, or would skitter to the safety of a nearby adult, who would regard Alice with displeasure, chariness, and then finally, fear. Alice would smile eerily at them and they would avert their eyes quickly to the floor or to the child cowering behind their back.

When an Aunt and Uncle were about to depart, she made a huge scene of grabbing their clothing and begging, screaming at them not to leave. A red-faced Mr. Brandon had a difficult time pulling his hysterical daughter off of them. Mrs. Brandon fought back tears and held a shaking hand over her mouth in horror. She had sworn she had given the child twice the amount of medication she normally did and wondered if she had built up a tolerance. Alice calmed herself immediately and her father let her go, feeling ashamed he had to manhandle his aberrant daughter in front of his entire family.

Alice seized her chance to address the aghast, mute mob and said in a loud voice, "You will remember this and fear me." Turning to her parents she crossed her arms in front of her chest, "So lock me away and get it over with."

Mrs. Brandon sobbed loudly while her sister-in-law soothed her. Alice stalkedto her mother and looked up at her with stormy grey eyes, her perfect ringlets shaking from barely contained rage.

"You don't want me. I was nothing but a disruptive distraction in your perfect life...you never loved me! Admit it! _ADMIT IT!_!"

Mr. Brandon screamed loudly his face pinched and umber;

"That's ENOUGH Mary Alice Brandon." and pointed stoically to the stairs to her room. Alice laughed maniacally, skipping up the stairs, the echo of her sinister glee reverberating amongst the hush of her astonished family members.

That evening, on the way home, the aunt and uncle that Alice had singled out were hit by a farm truck hauling a load of chickens. The husband died instantly while the wife remained in a coma for sixty-six days before she died.

Early the next morning, Alice was loaded into the car and taken to Jackson State Hospital where her parents washed their hands of her by signing her over as a ward of the State. Frightened but resigned, Alice was comforted with the precognitive knowledge that she would remember nothing of this purgatorywhich was her human life. The electro shock treatments and drug therapy they would give her would rape her soul, stealing her humanity long before she lost it permanently, to awaken and be like_ him. _

She knew it was necessary that this mantle of mortality be wasted away from her, shed like skin from a snake in order for her to get to her next level of her existence.

The electroshock therapy began right away to rid the child of her psychotic episodes. Clothed in the stained white johnny shirt issued to her, Alice was lead barefoot down a cold, deserted hallway.

Distant screams could be heard that sent chills down the little girl's spine. She wondered if she would scream like that, with no one to hear her that cared enough to comfort her. The first stop was a poorly lit room with a barber's chair and a pudgy tight-lipped woman holding a pair of scissors in her hands. Shiny black locks fell to the ground in clumps as she stared absently into the mirror as her femininity fell at her feet. Once the hair was cut as close as it could be to her head, she was shaved with a straight razor and led out into the frigid hall again.

The blue-green gloaming of the mercury vapor lamps added to the foreboding atmosphere as Alice walked towards the end of the memories of what she knew to be her life. She would become a blank slate. Tabula Rasa. Smiling to herself, a flickering form of a spirit in her peripheral vision put its spectral fingers to its lips, emitting a low _sssssshhhhh_ that only Alice could see and hear.

Directed silently to a room betwixt two nurses, Alice was faced by a man standing by a large black box with dials and switches. Connected to that was a headset with large pieces of cotton on the ends of it. Lifted on to the metal gurney with a thin scrap of a sheet over it, her muscles contracted against the cold surface and she suppressed a shiver. One of the nurses applied a slimy substance to her forehead and temples. "Conductor for the electrical currents," she was told softly when her furtive glance caught the eyes of one of her attendants. A wide piece of worn, bitten leather was placed unceremoniously in her mouth and she was instructed to bite down on it while her chin was held and pulled back firmly to keep her from hurting herself. Dying beneath a desperate moment of fear, Alice involuntarily emptied her bladder. No one made a move to clean her mess, ignoring the prone, trembling waif they were looming over as they set about their tasks.

She was embarrassed.

_Horrified_!

Quivering with dread of the pain to come.

The man at the black box flipped three switches. At the first one she felt a slight tingle at her temporal lobes. The second one buzzed, stinging dry fire of electricity along her whole body. The third one forced her back into a spastic high arch right up off the steel slab that was her soul's death bed. Bright blinding visions of her Mephistophelian, angelic blonde man filled every crack in the snapping, strobing remnants of her conscience. The leather strap fell from her mouth as she screamed,

"_JASPER!"_

Alice's world exploded into a brilliant burst of white light, then plunged into darknesswhen the switches were cut and the red needle had buried itself into inertness. Shot full of enough opium to bring down a three hundred pound man, she was placidly wheeled to her room, and tucked into her cot. A nurse checked her vitals every two hours.

When Alice finally awoke three days later, she remembered nothing. The oncoming days bled into each other with ceaseless monotony. They were fraught with fear and confusion within the colorless, dank existence that was her room, the drugged-out, tedious haze that was her day, and the cold pusillanimous nights that were her lonely, personal hell.

All the while, she felt eyes _watching her. _ Her prayers were full of pleas for her predator to remove her from this place. Surely anything would be better than this?

* * *

Please send RowanMoon some reviews! And check out Broken Doll; she just started posting it here, but it is up to 17 chapters on Twilighted.

Next Rebelward Without a Cause will be posted after chapter eight of Dead Confederates. And it will either be high hilarity with Sullen Cullen and Maw Esme, or the twin of this outtake in the form of our favorite EOF, Jazz. I've read them both and they are fucking stupendous, so if you haven't reviewed, faved or alerted RWaC yet, what the hell are you waiting for?


	4. Searching for Oblivion

**Rie**: Hey y'all, I am incredibly excited to bring this outtake to you from my friend, frol223 (Mer)! This is her first bit of fanfiction; and it is so damn sexy and pure Jazz, I know you'll enjoy.

**Mer**: I want to thank Rie for writing such an awesome story and inspiring me to write something for the first time. Thanks to the girls on Bad, Broken and Dead threads for bringing sunshine into my life and words into my soul. Kari, Tosh, V, April, Amanda, Gillian; you are goddesses!

V, baby, thank you, most lovely, most fastest beta!

Disclaimer: This is our Jazz. _Our Jazz!_ The rest of the Twi stuff belongs to SM.

***Warning: This gorgeous story contains slash.***

* * *

**Searching for Oblivion**

Want.

Desire.

Fear.

Anguish.

Hate.

Regret.

Wave after fucking wave crashes over me, threatening to toss my ass to the ground. I push back with calm. I so do not need this shit harshing my mellow. I have my own troubles to spin my mind into chaos. Memories of bloody fields, piles of smoke, tearing up the bodies of crazy fucking newborns and setting them alight. I have feasted on thousands. Maria's _little_ General. Plotting, fighting, winning, destroying. Not now. Now I try to let the negative wash over me, water off a vampire's back. If I could keep dear Eddie's deluge from capsizing me, all would be bliss.

I push myself out and off Bubba's dank porch couch. The bent coils are reluctant to let go of my ass, but I use my legs to propel me forward and away from the moldy upholstery. I need to sink into something else. Soft, hard, wet, tight. I want to hear pants and groans and feel nothing but the fucking and friction that will quell the maelstrom of emotions that swirls above me like prairie storm clouds. As I amble slowly toward my truck, I feel a last wave shove at me, force its way into my awareness..._protectiveness_? What the fuck? Eddie's emotions are all over the place. They sway more than our undershorts in the breeze on wash day at Maw Esme's. I look back at Eddie, still sittin', sullen as ever on that damn couch. His amber eyes settle on me, but they don't actually see. I raise my eyebrow at him, mutely asking, "What's up with you lately, bro?"

Eddie shakes his head once, vigorously to clear his thoughts, then a tense shake to push away my question. I shrug, _whatever_. Not going to let him get to me. He's been a swirling mess since he laid eyes on Bella and I got people to do.

The boy is waiting in his truck outside my trailer when I arrive. His nerves are buzzing me like outhouse flies as soon as my vintage Ford bounces on the cracked and rutted driveway up to Casa de la Whitlock. I have to have my own place. What with Bubba's insane lust and blueballs for Rosie, and Eddie's..._well_, being Eddie, I need some damn space away. Away from the shitstorm of emotions that our family can't control. Plus, I don't want my every thought heard while I'm balls deep in a distraction.

"Hey," he says to me. I feel his anguish along with his lust. He's scared and feeling guilty, nervous as a steed about to breed. Panicky as a rabbit in an open field with a rifle trained on its fluffy ass. _Gotta love the closeted ones._ Fighting themselves the whole way, just like I do, but for different reasons. I send a current of my own want straight at him; let it slide over him just like I'm going to. His eyes glaze for a moment and he licks his lips. I smile wide, venom at the back reaches of my throat, testing the tastebuds of my tongue, and only now I sense his desire. _Good. Much better, darlin'. I don't need the rest of it. Just your skin and your ass. Keep your inner demons to yourself. I have plenty of my own._

He follows me inside, past worn history books and empty beer cans. My laundry is piled on the table, newly acquired from Maw Esme; as ever she is spitting nickels at one wrongdoing or another of Eddie and Bubba. Always the outsider, the Rough Rider, the Cullens brand me as one of their own, but I feel misplaced. Loved and dignified, but always with lasting distaste as a bitter tincture, like dandelion greens on the tip of my tongue. I take his hand, this nameless boy, and lead him to the back, to my bed. Still scrubbing him with desire to keep his fear and guilt somewhere in the weeds. Swaying and greedy, his knees and legs muscular, reedy, I ply him with the passion, forgetting, absconding, oblivious, meeting that I need.

Again, I have my own victory in sight and this is not about trying to dispel any of his fucking uptight Bible-Belt guilt. Churning up mud from the riverbed while I baptize him into the all-cocking, ever-sucking revival of Jazz-love.

Once inside the tiny room, I turn and grab his belt buckle. I chuckle at the mud-flap girl that adorns it and pop it open with my thumb. Hmm. _No chrome tits here sweetness, all cock and no talk._

I yank his zipper and hear his breath catch. I keep working the calm and the lust. It wraps him like a blanket, covering the low-cuntry shame of _"man shall not lay with man."_ I don't want anything else taking up room. This is mine. No other emotions welcome here.

I don't need that shit.

He pushes his jeans and briefs down to his ankles and bends over to divest himself of them as well as his dusty boots. Once upright, he reaches for my waist and fumbles, his hands shaking as he repeats my actions and gets rid of the denim and dirt. I pull on his t shirt and lose sight of him for a moment as I yank it over his head. I remove my own, not wanting to distract him with having to do something else other than think about fucking. His pinpoint, young eyes are too weak to see the scars of battle that weave a thousand stories of a thousand deaths over my torso. I can see their shimmer and I shake back the tintype photos of dead comrades in arms laying in the orchard; spilling their youth into the soil. My own adolescence frozen in my veins for eternity; a silent monument to war and death.

I grab his cock in my hand and pull him with me until I am sitting on the edge of the bed and he is standing in front me, bobbing hard-on at eye level. He's my freak on a leash and I'm not letting this shit go. I pull my hand up his shaft and swipe my thumb across the top. He shudders and I feel the weight of guilt ooze and sag into the anxiousness of want. _Much better._ I lean forward and swap my thumb's movements for my tongue. Teasing a drop of liquid from his head, I suck it down. Not as sweet as blood, but it'll do. I open my mouth and slide down onto him, feeling his hips thrust forward slightly as he glides further down my throat. My lips twist into a grin around his cock and I decide to up the ante. Slurping down his shaft, my tongue twists on the sensitive skin just under the head and I move my hands around his waist and down the cleft of his ass. Fingers touching, teasing, squeezing, and coaxing him into the kind of frenzy I need to drown out the horrid images of blood and bodies and fighting.

My digits dip, pushing back light curls that surround the tight pucker of his hole; divide, divulge, discover. Moving in small circles, I tease the ridged rim to add the tips of fingers, stretching, strategizing, bringing his emotions to a fever pitch. All the while, my mouth assaults him, my tongue breaking trails through his fear and leaving no room for anything but moans and slurred curses.

"_Shit, Jazz....shit!"_

I don't speak but douse him with a calming wave from inside me. I need this; I need his release, and I need my own. No other traitorous emotions clanging their death knell into my skull. _Just this._ Just sweat and panting and prodding and fucking.

His hips buck faster and I execute my next maneuver. I turn him, hands on hips, pushing him onto his back, unto the threadbare quilt of the bed I never use, except for these moments.

I grab a condom and Wet from the cracked night table, to keep the venom to myself and it's helluvalot easier than explaining any weird stains to Ma Esme. I slide the condom onto my pole and grab the bottle of liquid pleasure. Squeezing a few drops into my hand and over my palm, soothing it hotly around my dick, I then push some, sweetly, savagely, into the rim of his ass to get him ready. Hitching his long feet over my shoulders, his wide dilated human eyes have said goodbye to reality and are maddened fragments reflecting the horrifyingly needful, erotic magnetism to have my dick all up his beautifully taught, straining, young ass.

I get ready to ride. _Yeehaw, babe._

I push the head of my cock against his ass, the muscles denying me at first, _as if_! I thrust forward past the resistance and wait, giving him a moment and a dose of tranquility to relax him into the feel of me buried deep against his ass cheeks. "_Ah...yeees,"_ I hiss quietly.

After what seems like a fuckton of time, he moves his hips like an anxious filly, urging me forward and I kindly oblige. Holding onto his strident structured-with-muscle hips, the tendons pure jaunty jutting striations of ligature that I want to suck, squeeze, bite, devour, I pull back, making sure not to grab him too hard lest I scare him in this little indoctrination to the underside of lust and ruin my moment of single-emotion silence.

Forward and back, my cock slides in and out, slick with lubrication, clasped in the most rigid of escapes. He is tight and hot and squeezing, and my mind is drinking in the only emotion in the room. I can smell the sweat on his skin, acrid juxtaposition to my own never-ending acrimony; along with the road grime and the beer he drank before coming to meet me, seeking to drown his edginess in brew. Grunting, pushing, pulling, grabbing, he shoves his fingers deep into my hands, between my deadly fingers; cold, ice, hot, human, gripping right down into the skin that joins digit to palm that used to be valleys of soft flesh, but was now caverns of the Arctic, although no less sensitive. Even more hyper-aware of the caress, stroking the bloody baggage of my hands, my palms, while I abrade his sweet sexy ass with my turgid huge cock. I can feel my balls tighten as my climax grinds closer.

Enervation meets saturation. Oblivion unto asylum. Within the dark, gripping, groping, fastening of my dick inside of him, this innocent and nameless boy, I feel compelled to peel my eyes off of his heaving chest, topped with deep brown paps that I lurch over, pressing my lips, my full-open mouth, the blade, the weapon of my tongue. If I flicked that young pebbled skin fast enough, I would inflict him with venom. Kill him. Or make him mine for eternity.

"Stroke your cock, babe, I need you to come with me," shunting utterances that were husky, rocky, undiscovered roads of the past. All the torture that no one wanted to know.

A quiet. A still. A cascade. Waterfall and the laden pails of a windmill toppling over. Sex. Future. Blinding. Unseeing and seeing something more than I really wanted to know.

_Hush now, darlin'. _I speak these words to myself, and to him.

He does as he is told, his mind incapable of anything else. _Perfect_. No feelings of love, fear; nothing but his lust as he jerks his cock chasing his own climax. In these moments, I am able to enjoy my own brand of silence. No intruding bullshit into my brain or across my nerves. Then, as the moment of pure white ecstasy arrives, I feel something else, something forcing its way through the slow haze of sex.

Fear.

Anger.

Pain.

_Love?_

_Dammit,_ no! What the fuck? My multitasking, mellowed-the-fuck-out, vampire brain is able to cope with this shit in seconds, and I realize it's not coming from the gorgeous distraction groaning against my gorging thrusts. Reaching across miles and screwing with my screwing, this is someone else entirely! Feminine. Slight. Dark to my bright orgasm on the horizon. I push faster and harder, trying to fuck away this intrusion, get back to the task, or cock, at hand; to let this other shit go. My writhing boy groans louder while I sink in and suck out, hitting hard so that our skin slaps, our balls sway and suck against his ass and the base of my cock, wetness crawls down around us; his sweat and leaking cum to my poison. In the throes of fucking him so hard that I could easily crush his pelvis, his ribcage, rob him of breath, take him right down into my own death, I am strangely calmed by feeling only one emotion and it's definitely here in this place and nowhere else.

He comes across his stomach and curses. His muscles jerk and squeeze along my shaft. The feeling of his ass gripping my cock inside pulls my orgasm from me and I shoot into the condom, _shit fuck yeeesss._ I sigh.

In that moment, when if I were human I would stop breathing for just a second and my eyes would cross and my dick still throbs, I feel it again. Just a fucking flash of longing and anticipation; almost a scream.

_JASPER!_

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I beg you to show some huge love for this stunning gem! Let Mer know what you thought, it's her first time out of the paddock.

Obviously, if you're reading this, you should be reading _Dead Confederates_, right?

Finally, I started a very short story…_Incarcerated._ It is sultry southern slash (not at all like DC's); angsty and dark and sexy Edward and Jasper. Chapter two will be up soon, JPOV.


	5. Mad About the Boy

**A/N: May I proudly present M'Esme, by Gasaway Alley and Viola Cornuta!**

**V****: Ta, bb, for masta-beta'ing!**

**Dis****claimer: We don't own anything, apart from a wicked sense of humor.**

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**Mad About the Boy**

**=*=The Edward's POV=*=**

Still in my wooden 'time-out chair', I wait while counting the hairline cracks created in the plaster from butting my head against it. The fissures scroll out into gentle, curly splines, spelling out Bella's name thirty-three times. Then there are the jagged crags that look like thirty-three hearts breaking in two. Softest of soft footfalls can be heard coming towards my door. A quiet breath is drawn, followed by an exhaled, "_Cheeky sod_," before my door opens to reveal Esme, _yet not_. I know in an instant who this is, and it's my fault she is here.

"Ma'am, I do not want any trouble," I say, as I stand and hold up my hands in mock defense as a vision of Southern sugar and canned wrath flourishes in through my bedroom door. _She has a presence_. "I have already said my peace concerning Eddie." I shudder. _Eddie, God, I hate that shortening of my name!_ "He is the most ungentlemanly and vainglorious version of me I have ever read." I pause in my diatribe to take a longer breath before plunging ahead, "The way he regards people in general is just sickening. Has he forgotten he once was human? People are not 'bovine-ified, stench-ridden, skin bags'. They have feelings and are capable of colossal feats of idealism, unbelievable works of literature, miraculous effigies, and exquisite symphonies. Everything from _his_ clothes, trucks, and…and _music_, to the double-wide he lives in were all created by human beings."

"The Edward," Eddie's mother begins calmly, ignoring my largely incoherent outburst, "your sainted mother asked me to speak with y'all. Your mama is a kind soul, too kind to put up with your whiny ways. So she sent me to take you in hand."

Dumbfounded, I stare at this diminutive, benzine-brown-haired woman who shares the same beautiful face as my Esme. But, she couldn't possibly be further from my mother in actuality. _This_ Esme is dressed in a floral peach blossom and cream delight sundress, so starched it crackles when she moves. Champagne-gilded satin gloves she wears, going all the way up to her elegant elbows. She also carries some kind of matching floral messenger-style bag and a lacy parasol, which she puts down on my black sofa along with the ludicrously voluminous hat she came in wearing. The hat is huge, like windmill huge, something you would see a woman wearing at the Kentucky Derby, _times two_. It is decorated with yards of stiff, net-like fabric in creole cream and charm school pink hues that twist here and there, and it sports a... _small stuffed squirrel on it?_

"Don't look so shocked, boy, please do turn that chair 'round to sit n' face me properlike. Your Esme does have her limits. She hasn't been this upset since Jessica Stanley up-chucked in her herbaceous border at that graduation party your sister Alice insisted on hostin'. Between vomit-for-fertilizer, all those human boys tearing up her lawn playin' cornhole, not to mention Mike Newton calling her a MILF, she was 'bout ready to pitch a fit and fall in it. Your daddy Carlisle got nicely hot and bothered about her bein' called a MILF, which your mama quite liked, but never mind that now.

"You're hurtin' more'n yourself with this behavior. No mama can tolerate her chirrun's sadness. I brought her the latest copy of the _Charleston Gardens_ catalog along with a fruit pie to send to her Carlisle's office staff, and she perked up jest a mite. Now, what exactly have you been thinkin' since Esme put your sorry self in time-out?"

I pinch the bridge of my nose, "I am trying to be an equal opportunity thinker in terms of all the different sides and outtakes of my character. But, when I see my precious Bella being ogled at, spoken of, and especially touched in the manner in which _he does_, it completely unnerves me and, quite frankly, pisses me the hell off!"

"Hush your mouth, son. I'll overlook the rudeness you show by such language, because _my_ boys know better'n to be fresh in my presence," she reproves, narrowing her eyes. "Have you really read my Eddie's words? He may ogle n' he may fantasize, but he has, in all goldenmeadow's chapters, gazed at Bella longingly for weeks on end, taken her to the movies with her daddy's permission, kissed her sweetly, saved her life, cut her away from that trashy dawg-boy - _thank you, Jesus_ - danced with her and escorted her home by curfew. Indeed, I have high hopes he'll assure her how he purely loves her. Li'l Alice, our Junior's woman, _bless her heart,_ but that child ain't quite right, done told me Eddie will passionately declare himself to his Bella soon enough. But there're some things a mama needn't know in detail 'bout her sons' pastimes.

"Answer me, The Edward, how is Eddie's behavior truly different or less respectful than what y'all did in Forks Bella's junior year? And I don't even want to get into what happened during that poor child's entire senior year, when you your own self were such a disgrace to your daddy's fine name. I know you think highly of Miz Meyer, and certainly a boy should always respect his elders, but that woman has a lot to answer for, since she set you to acting like that."

Sheepishly, I ask, "Well, ma'am, or may I call you Maw Esme?"

"I prefer M'Esme, thank you kindly. Please don't tell my boys, but I don't rightly care for 'Maw'. I prefer 'Mum', but I had to leave all that in England along with my silver tea service, my Jaeger jackets and my Pratesi linens . Cain't break character after all. Good thing I stored the fine sterling in the strong box, or our li'l Alice, like I said, that child jest ain't quite right, might stuff the tea strainer in her hobo bag."

"I do apologize for the ill-timed use of profanities." I am truly mortified! I have never before cursed in front of a lady. And, that Alice of hers is a bit on the strange side. _Hmm...but not all that different from my Alice, those little fingers can pinch._

M'Esme sighs and rolls her eyes, shockingly unlike any gesture my own mother makes. "The Edward, I have heard more cussin' since we moved to South Car'lina than I ever did in my undead life, and those Brits swear worse'n my first husband! Bubba was raised in the Tennessee hills, Junior in the Texas dust, and my darlin' Carl, well, he's a Renaissance boy through and through on account of the time of his birth. _Each one was fluent in cuss afore they lost their milk teeth._ It was poor Eddie who struggled to settle down and act like a young 'un when we first moved to the lowcountry. Jest because I've heard it all, don't mean I like it; these days my boys are scrappin' about a deal more'n tires, testicles, and tune-ups. But, I'm dithering here. You wanted to say sumpthin', son, so speak up!"

"Please, I mean no disrespect when I tell you I know where everyone is from." _Honestly, does she ever shut up? How does she hunt? Herds of deer must flee from the sound of her voice._

"None taken, The Edward. But I'm losing patience. When that happens, my palm itches. When my palm itches, I box ears. So please, child, tell me what's in your heart. This is your gal you're hurting, and your very long life you're wastin'."

Mental images of her cuffing Emmett/Bubba run through her mind as she apparently lets down her defenses. When she first swept in, her mind was blocking mine by singing 'Ride of the Valkyries' by Richard Wagner. Stupidly, it reminded me of Emmett watching Looney Tunes on television in the 1960's. He loved when Elmer Fudd would sing _"Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit". _

Trying to distract her a little more from the uncomfortable conversation, I ask, "So, how did Esme get in touch with you exactly? I have read you do not 'abide the innernet thingamajig'." Narrowing my eyes, I zero in on this Chantilly version of Esme, "I'm pretty sure she doesn't have your phone number."

Breaking into charming laughter, exactly mirroring my own mother, M'Esme giggles, "The Edward, I'll tell you my secret. Your sweet mama emailed me! What I tell my boys, _'I don't abide'_, ain't always the Lord's truth. I daren't touch that clapped-out, dial-up, ancient desktop computer they use. Not a one needed it for his schooling', they just about broke my heart when they was expelled this last time. Ordering auto parts and guns, browsing for delineations of nekkid women! Nekkid men too, that rascal Junior's _so_ curious. There ain't enough Lysol disinfectant wipes at the Piggly Wiggly to clean that poxy keyboard. Even my trips to Costco for buyin' in bulk -- _I do so like to be thrifty _-- cain't keep those tossers, uh,..._those youngsters,_ tidy.

"So Carl bought me the sweetest li'l MacBook Pro, I keep it tucked in my quilted carrier, Vera Bradley's the name of the lady who makes 'em, in the cedar chest at the foot of our bed. When I go to do my gardenin' design, I sling the bag over my shoulder and skip past the boys. We don't see as much of Jazz now that little Alice, bless her heart, has moved into his place. He sure don't have any callers anymore. He used to have company his way reg'lar, but I still hear plenty that's none of my business. With Bubba all moonpie'd about his Rose and Eddie scowlin' so hard his face might freeze, most days I'm happy to see the back of the whole boilin'. I pay a visit to the coffee shop out on the highway, it has what they call 'wifi'. I order a sweet tea, _nasty stuff_, but I can sip on it if I spike it with a goodly shot of Southern Comfort from my flask. Then I happily pass my time, visiting Smith & Hawken, Martha Stewart, goodvibes and The Pleasure Chest."

"The Pleasure Chest, really?" _Hmmm...the possibilities._

"You can Google it, child."

I look covertly around the room towards M'Esme's quilty-looking, floral-patterned bag on my couch a few feet away. It is sitting together with her abominable hat. That squirrel is giving me the hairy eyeball!

"Uh, do you think I could borrow that for a moment?" I point at the edge of the laptop peeking from under the flap of her bag.

Dropping my hand and looking down quickly, I go for the ever-popular slow look up through my lashes, starting at the stems of her legs before traveling north. I decide to beguile M'Esme with my best crooked smile, which I know dazzled many older women. Just ask Mrs. Cope at Forks High. _Although, I better be careful with this one. She is not older than me per se._ "I promise my hands are clean. I have never so much as touched my, um, _member_. At least not since I was seventeen." I held up my hands as if to show her my cleanliness. _Well, that wasn't embarrassing at all_.

M'Esme sighs, chuckles softly, clears her throat unnecessarily, "Well now, that might be a problem. In truth, sweet boy, _your_ problem. I pride myself on bein' a lady in ever' way, Lord knows it's an uphill battle 'round Bubba. I'm honored to have been happily married to a doctor for many years, and that dear lusty man's taught me a few things. The Edward, reg'lar touchin' of your lallydoodle is part of growin' up. Eddie won't let go, and y'all cain't take ahold; stuck on stupid, both you boys. Now as I was sayin', before I power up my laptop, you need to tell me what you've learnt in time out."

Sitting back down in my chair, I ponder her words_. Lallydoodle? Can she be talking about my penis? Fine, since she brought it up, might as well really throw her off... _"Do you think you might be able to help me with that?" I waggle my eyebrows at her suggestively, flashing her another wayward grin. After all, she is here to help me. "Maybe you would care to come sit in my lap while you browse your 'innernet thingy'? I could show you a few things I have learned over the years steeping in the one-track minds of my shag-aholic siblings. Maybe you will let me push your enter key or click and roll the button on your mouse?"

"I ain't going to dignify that with a response, boy, but I will say as a woman, not as a mother, that's exactly how you should be courtin' your Bella. Take her off her precious pedestal to tease her a bit." _This one needs to be taken out behind the shed n' whupped until his nose bleeds buttermilk. What's Domward's email address; he owes me a few favors!_

"Um, M'Esme? You know I can read your mind, right?" I slowly shift a little in my seat, giving her a full view of me readjusting the swelling bulge which popped up with the entrancing thought of discipline. _Ha! She looked! Hmm, whips...Esme always has been pretty hot. I am starting to think Newton's MILF comment at that grad party was right...Stop it! This is exactly the kind of behavior that you have been on your soapbox about. Rebelward. Must. Not. Win!_

"Yes, I know all 'bout what makes you so, um, _special_, The Edward. I ain't gonna fall in a faint for you. I ain't fooled by my Eddie's parlour tricks and bedroom eyes either, so just go dazzle yourself. Keep your sass to yourself as well. Put on your big boy pants, the black boxer briefs suit you best, and face up to the natural fact that every Edward out there will only ever find happiness in life or in undeath through his Bella. 'Course, sometimes Edward's jes' fine n' dandy with his Jasper, but like I always say, there're some things a mama don't need to know in detail."

"Oh, do not even get me started on 'slash'_,_ is it? That is the most unholy of all. I mean, really, who wants to read that?" _That did it. Pants back to fitting correctly. _

"Son, you need to git out more, close on a century of matriculatin' instead of masturbatin' sure isn't showin' up to your credit with this foolishness. Lord, you do get on my last nerve."

_"_Well, why is it always Jasper and me? Why can't they pick on Emmett more? He fills the rough trade bill with his muscles. Wrap him in one of those shiny, black, leather outfits!" _ Jesus, Cullen, whine much?_ I castigated.

"You're so right, child, all you boys look perfectly charmin' in black leather. After all, nothing's new under the sun, a li'l bit of sweet guy-on-guy always makes those Jaspward-shippers very happy, and they're a vocal bunch of bawdy fangirls. I do purely love for folks to be happy, so if you want a wider range of storylines about you and Emmett, you go right ahead and write one yourself."

"I do not mean Emmett and me! Just a little less me!He and Jasper can find some 'Other Character' from the books to bottom for them. And pardon me, I still do not see how _any_ of this is your business. But yeah, fine, I am jealous, okay? All the other Edwards get to go after their own Bellas in their own stories. I mean, even Jasper and Emmett are getting some, and you and, um, Carl, too. And, now _my_ _Bella_ is threatening to go down South to your clan! I caught her trying to talk to Rie through April on that damn, _uh sorry_, Dead Confederates thread on Twilighted." Suddenly my shelves full of music and movies appear much more interesting than having to look at M'Esme until she says the next words.

"The Edward, you stop whining or I'll know the reason why! Stop prancing around the bloody, _oops_, I mean blasted mulberry bush like a newly gelded foal! Do I need to take your daddy's belt to you? I can make it sting if'n I set my mind to it. Discipline by 'rum, sodomy and the lash' is a fine English tradition, one I think very highly of, so don't you think I'm fooling here.

"If you hadn't taken it upon yourself to speak for _all _the other Edwards in the fandom in a _public_ letter to my boy, you wouldn't be in this here per_dick_ament. Straighten those stone shoulders, and 'git over your bad self'. I heard that saying on the radio at the coffee shop last week, it fits you perfectly."

M'Esme peels off her gloves delicately, one finger at a time. _Wait, am I the one being dazzled? _If I were human, my palms would be as I swallow nervously, she reaches into her floral bag and withdraws a folded piece of cream-colored paper. _Oh God no, that is my stationery, the 100% rag cotton, monogrammed, Crane & Company ecru stock I use for personal correspondence._ She begins to intone in a clipped fashion that sounds pompous, yet oddly familiar, _unngh...she is not drawling sweetly anymore, she is...mimicking me! How sexy is that? _

_I am so going to hell...._

_**Dear Rebelward,**_

_**Eddie is it? I have been asked by all the "Edwards" of Twilight to address some issues that we have with you.**_

_**First of all, I do not take kindly to your connotations of "telling it like it is". How dare you malign my sweet, fragile Isabella like that? It is quite obvious to me that she may have legs, but I would carry her anywhere, until my marble-like feet wear off! Isabella is my sun and my moon, and I will protect her with my last immortal breath. She is my life!**_

_**While it is true, we are all hung like horses, I would never, ever deign to push my Isabella into having sex with me. I could hurt her or, God forbid…kill her. **_

_**Furthermore, Volvos are manly!**_

_**Lastly, I take to task anyone who speaks ill of the great Stephenie Meyer. Without her, there would be no Edward Anthony Cullen. Again I say, how dare you?**_

_**You, sir, are a mockery of a gentleman! There is a laundry list of injustices you have brought against us, and we have thrown down the gauntlet! **_

_**With great conviction,**_

_**(The) Edward Anthony Cullen **_

M'Esme looks over the top of the letter, and in a lilting voice which sends pleasurable shivers down my icy spine, "Now it's all out in the open, The Edward. You need to apologize for this tomfoolery. Not to Eddie, that boy can handle anything. Lord knows all he does is handle things, has his hand down his trousers ever' time I come 'round the corner. Make amends with your Bella, child. You love each other but talkin' about her private life in that letter hurt her heart. She has a mighty fine swing in her backyard, and you know she sure wishes y'all'd take a ride on it."

"Since Esme sent you to, _ahem_, straighten me out and take me in hand," _oh God, that sounds delicious_, "where do you suggest I start? I do love to dance with my Bella. When she will let me, anyway. You know, because she is so discomfited by her clumsiness and all."_ Stop babbling! _ "What about you, M'Esme? Would you like to dance with me? I could hum my sweet angel's lullaby."

Now I am back to standing and looking deep into her lambent, amber, flecked eyes. _Maybe I will get a little "happy ending" time with M'Esme. That parasol she carried in along with her floral tote made her look like a sweet confectioner's dream....I do, maybe, need some practice in the erotic embrace of a real woman. Bella would never need to know, and it _is_ for her benefit. Maybe Carl would not really mind, _if_ he is as compassionate as my father Carlisle is. That is a lot of maybes. _

I catch a fresh memory of Carl dipping M'Esme low to seductive strains of music playing in the background, just before he sweeps her in his arms and carries her "bridal style" out of the room. _Smooth, Carl! I will have to use that move with Bella._

The stiff folded notepaper floats from Eddie's mother's delicate fingers, as her eyes travel slowly over me. I hear her thoughts break through,

"_C__lever dick_..._such a pretty child, but he's too smart by half...sister Alice does dress him well...lucky li'l Bella...oh my stars, so that's what they mean by 'too big for his britches'!" _

I let out the breath I would never need to hold. _Oh yes, M'Esme's core curriculum just may indeed be at my fingertips after all!_

Suddenly M'Esme grins broadly with the preternatural gleam of our kind, and I know she is reading _my_ mind. The bulge does make things obvious. _Thank God,_ _Alice chose fashionably baggy, comfortably cut jeans today_. She reaches again into her floral tote.

"The Edward, Carl and I discussed back home what I should bring y'all, as a lady should never pay a call without packing gifts for the family. You're right, I do most dearly love to dance. Here's our present, it might could help with your romancin'. It's Dusty Springfield's 2-disc tribute album, _At Her Very Best_, produced by that odd li'l Sir Elton John. Track 2 of disc one, oh that's Carl's n' my special song, _Son of a Preacher Man_!' My darlin' preacher's kid can twirl n' dip with me 'til the cows come home as he growls that song in my ear. Now track 1 on disc two, make sure y'all listen to that with Bella, and dance with her close. It'll melt her heart, plus a few other things'll get nice and melty too. _The Look of Love_ works ever' time for me, that saxophone solo midway through, _my oh my! _ I believe my boys do call it 'panty droppin' music'.

"Remember, when you visit The Pleasure Chest on your own laptop, first thing to order up is a sweet blue 'Diving Dolphin' and plenty of batteries for y'all and Bella. And please, child, always wash those hands."

Suddenly, blissfully silent at last, M'Esme slowly skims the fingertips of one hand along my cheek, over my jawline, while running the other hand through my hair..._ohhh yes, that is so nice, but what is it with women_ _and__the hair?..._cracks her palm sharply against my ear, gathers her things, then ghosts out of the room and down the stairs.

Stunned, I fall back into my chair and look at the CD case M'Esme has given me before I slide disc two into my CD changer. Now the South Carolina Crocus has left the building, it's time for me to face my egregious crimes against my beloved. M'Esme certainly has given me enough advice, or rather _shoved_ enough advice down my throat, for me to be honest about my relationship with Bella. My self-denial and refute of her advances, all in the name of caution, has caused this rift. Caused her to seek out a more willing and experienced paramour from the New South.

That _Microscopic Meddler_, Alice, has finally convinced me, albeit sometimes painfully,that I would not, could not hurt Bella. Now, with Eddie's distasteful but effective example before me, I have learned my lesson. _ Why I'm condemned to read _his_ fetid mind too, I will never know._

Bella is not the most patient of women and finding her panties time and time again stashed in my pockets, dresser drawers, even under the seat of my car, has laid waste to my control more times than I can count. _Petite coquinne! _

Speaking of Bella's panties, there's a concealed stash in my top dresser drawer. Like quicksilver, I dashed over to the bureau and reach in for my treasure trove of little frothy scraps of delight and sit back down in my ladder back. Secret vivid thoughts begin to play out in my head, and I close my eyes as visions of Bella in my bed night after night tap-dance their way down to my_ lallydoodle_. Looking down at the tent rising in my lap, I rip the button fly open in one sharp pull. Each metal button makes a loud, satisfying pop as it works free of its denim prison doors.

Once the fly is open enough, the snaps on the boxers are next. I palm the object of Bella's obsessive desire, all the while fingering and intermittently inhaling the skimpy silk and spidery lace, before taking an experimental journey up and down my hardness. Shifting lower with the hand still holding the silkies, I cup the soft skin hanging below my shaft and rub the satin-smooth fabric back and forth, tugging lightly to heighten the pleasure. Clenching my sharp teeth, I pump a few times, remembering the last time I cockblocked Bella from trying to seduce me.

_Fuck!_ That was the last we spoke, before her declaration of seceding to the Palmetto State. Before my relegation to sulking in this corner purgatory, and before I posted that heinous letter. It's time for me to be a man and show my Swan I am as gritty, dirty, and potent a lover as Confeddie could ever be.

Abandoning the panties, I grab my little silver cell phone, auto-dialing Bella's number while Dusty Springfield's landmark white soul sound and my long-anticipated white lightning release pour over me. "Bella, love, I need you now...."

**=*=M'Esme's POV=*=**

"Oh, well done," I muse aloud to myself, pausing briefly on the stairs, "you go claim your Bella. My Ed's got his hands full with his own! Funny little creatures, so worrisome, their happiness will be hard won but worth it."

I hear The Edward's buttons fly across his room as I continue my smooth descent and know it is only a matter of minutes before he finally takes that lovely pleasure out of hiding and then rings Bella on his mobile. Now maybe the poor darling girl will no longer weep into her pillow about spontaneous combustion. _And a clandestine knicker collection, men are so extraordin'rily predictable in their fetishes, mortal and immortal alike. How could he imagine his mother missed that? Who does he thinks puts his laundry away? At least _my_ boys have no illusions on that score. If Mum is unhappy, everybody is unhappy--and out of clean clothes!_

The Edward's Esme is delighted our plan has worked, and so my task in Forks is done. We have no more need to fret, it just took a mother's loving touch. Pity I didn't get to touch much.

After tying on my prized hat that Bella trimmed for me, I put on my best Jackie-O sunglasses. With a fond wave to my _doppelganger_, I slip in a favorite CD Carl burned for me and switch it to _Mad About the Boy._ The composer of the song, Noel Coward, caused quite a 'slash_'_ shiver back in the day when he wrote this song about Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

I motor off in my pearl white '72 Mercedes 350sl vintage roadster, with the top down, gleefully speeding away the 3100 miles 'til I can be back in Cainwhore to thoroughly roger my dearest, orally-fixated, cigar-chomping Carl.

The styling of Dinah Washington accompanies me home,

_I'm mad about the boy _

_And I know it's stupid to be mad about the boy _

_I'm so ashamed of it but must admit the sleepless nights I've had _

_About the boy _

_Mmmm on the silverscreen _

_He melts my foolish heart in every single scene _

_Although I'm quite aware that here and there are traces of the cad _

_About the boy _

_Lord knows I'm not a fool-girl _

_I really shouldn't care _

_Lord knows I'm not a school-girl _

_Who's in the flurry of her first affair _

_Will it ever cloy _

_This odd diversity of misery and joy _

_I'm feeling quite insane and young again _

_And all because I'm mad about the boy _

_I'm feeling quite insane and young again _

_And all because I'm mad..._

_About the boy! _

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**~~Does your tummy hurt from laughing so hard?~~**

**Mine fucking does! **

**Leave a shitload of love (I mean, I want the outhouse topplin' over with reviews) for Viola Cornuta and Gasaway Alley; they brought M'Esme to town and **_**she**_** took The Edward in hand.**

**Gasaway writes a l'il somethin' called **_**Kick the Tires and Light the Fires**_**, so check it out. Vi has done an outtake for that story under **_**Victory Lane**_**. ** **Miss Vi is also my fan-fuckin'-tastic beta for my contest/challenge entries.**

**A little Eddie time: Dead Confederates has placed in the final round of voting for The Faithful Shipper Awards (Favorite Author – Canon, AU, AH, Best AU, and the man himself for Best Character that is OOC)! Voting ends Oct. 13****th****. Go to thefaithfulshipperawards(DOT)webs(DOT)com(SLASH)finalvotinground(DOT)htm**


	6. From Beautiful Bride to Southern Siren

**V and Vi, **thank you most lovely, kind, wonderful beta's, destroyers of overuse of 'that' and comma-instigators extraordinaire!

**Disclaimer: **Okay, there are definitely some parts of this we own. The base material comes from SM.

And now, here's a little Rose and Mama Brown from a wonderful friend and fellow writer, **Jaspersbrand**.

~~ Thanks to Rie, V and Vi (oh my!) for being awesome betas and not spanking me (too hard) for all my mistakes! Rie, double wide thanks for letting me play with the DC crew and giving Mama and Rose voices!~~

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**From Beautiful Bride to Southern Siren**

**Mama Brown's – Present Day**

Five more fucking hours in this god-forsaken rat hole. And for what? The joy of coming back and doing it again tomorrow?! No. To pay the bills? No, again, I've got that covered. Bills and money aren't something you have to worry about when you're immortal. Then what…the company? _Hell no_, _that's what Garrett's waiting in my little Old Village cottage for,_ I think, slamming my drink tray down on the nearest table a little harder than I anticipated, almost splintering the wood. I have to remember to watch my strength. It isn't my place to wreck, it's Mama Brown's, and she doesn't deserve this; the attitude, the disrespect, the demolition. She's done so much for me; I owe her more than she knows.

I remember all too well the shape I was in when I first arrived in Cainhoy -- _Cainwhore_ as the locals like to call it -- and Mama B was the only one willing to take a chance on a shattered spirit. She knew _everything_, my past, my present, what could be my future. The night I dragged my lifeless ass into her diner, she knew something wasn't right with me, and I don't mean my emotional state. I let my mind wander to that night ten years ago, right in this very diner.

**Ten Years Ago**

"Rose, you look like something the supernatural cat dragged in," Mama said as I slouched into a stool in the almost empty diner. Save for a few drunks, the place was deserted. Sunday nights around the South weren't spent drinking. It was time best placed on one's knees, in worship of a deity I couldn't get behind. I much preferred the obeisant posture when before a gorgeous cock instead of the crucified form of Jesus.

"How did you know my name?" I asked bewildered.

"Dear child, I've seen y'all before," she answered, knowingly. "My Mama used ta collect old clippings and photos of the town goings-on. She saved them in shoe boxes; I still have 'em. I'd look at them from time to time as a youngin'. I came across your'n and one I'm assuming was of Irina. You two were the most beautiful beings my eyes ever have fallen upon; I knew then and there you wasn't human. Now, darlin', what can Mama Brown do for you?"

"Would you like to hear my story? It doesn't have a happy ending — but which of my kind does? If we had happy endings, we'd all be under gravestones now." She just nodded her dark head sagely, the beaded ends of her beautifully-wrought corn rows tinkling like those ever-blessed church bells downtown that never shut the hell up, encouraging me to go on.

**Rochester, New York – 1933 **

_Should I wear my hair up or down? Dark or light maquillage for the big day?-- I thought, walking home from Vera's one night. Which would Royce prefer? Everything was for Royce now. Everything. My life. My body. My virginity. He could have it all, and in return, he would grant me the future I'd always dreamt of. A large home of my very own to decorate as I wished. A husband to cook, and keep house for and care for. One day, a child I could dote on. A sweet baby, my most cherished dream. _

_Wouldn't Vera be jealous of me then? For so long I'd had to watch her with her husband; her beloved Robert. Oh how I'd despised seeing them together. Him so loving, so affectionate toward her. Not the way Royce was with me. Robert loved his wife absolutely; Royce loved what he got out of me. I might have been beautiful but never dim-witted. I knew exactly why Royce picked me over any other young girl in upstate New York. I didn't blame him. I wasn't in it for love either, not entirely. Part of me hoped it'd eventually turn into that enormous giddiness and forever giving of the heart, but for now it was a matter of convenience. _

_Why hadn't I realized sooner how little regard he truly had for me? _

_As I turned off Vera's street, heading home, my thoughts veered away from Royce, back to our portending nuptials. Noticing the temperature had dropped significantly since I'd left my friend's manse, I pulled my astrakhan coat tighter around my body, my pert trimmed hat doing nothing to shield my ears. It was cold for April, even for New York. Temperatures like this were unheard of this late into spring, and it brought a light snow. I should have called Daddy to come take me home in the Auburn, but it was such a short walk I hadn't bothered. Huddling closer into my smart coat, I was worried about having to move the wedding inside; it was only a week away, and this blustery, damp cold blowing down from the Hudson wrapped its unsettling iciness inside of my Spring suit and blouse. _

_Instead of shivering and striding along with my eyes narrowed to every gas light I passed, I should have been paying attention to my surroundings. Had I but noticed the group of men off in the distance! However, at the time, they were the least of my worries._

_I remember now my insipid concerns that evening, wondering if the entire wedding party would fit in the parlor of the King family's four-story brownstone before I heard the commotion. Five well-dressed men, obviously drinking, started hollering at me. Shouting _my_ name! I certainly didn't associate with supposed gentlemen who acted this way; bracing my thick, stiff collar more closely about my neck, I rushed onward. The last thing I remember thinking was fight or flight. _Run Rose, you have to run._ But then, realizing one of the detestable men was Royce, I paused. _

That_ was my grave mistake. My undoing. My ending._

_Royce started rambling on and on to one of the other men about how much prettier I was than any 'Georgia Peach'. His comrades argued that it was too hard to reckon my attributes because I was so warmly dressed. Pulling hard with his Lacrosse-hardened hands and arms, gripping the hand-stitched seams of the luxuriant, velvet-trimmed ivory coat he'd purchased himself, Royce took back his gift, ripping it from my shoulders. This was the side of him I'd always understood rizzled underneath his smooth, socially acceptable, polished appearance. His shiny lacquer cracked, his true persona emerged. And Royce was more a monster than I'd ever be!_

_He then reached up with the loutish hands he'd kept hidden behind pseudo-chivalric tendencies, and started roughly pulling the pins from my hair. Every time I screamed, Royce's mates broke out into fits of jocular laughter. My shattering shrieks riled them even more._

_I shut down, crawled inside myself, tried to run from the horror rampaging around me. I was as pure as the driven snow, my womanliness, a sacred thing, was meant for one man, for Royce. And he took it as if it was his just dues, far before his time as my husband._

_The next thing I knew, I was flying; soaring over the roof-tops through the silent, slumbering town of Rochester. I looked up into the golden eyes of a pale woman with silver-blond hair that hung straight in a blunt edge at her chin. She was breathtakingly beautiful. It was hard for me to admit, as I held my own good looks a notch or two above the rest, but that she was. This graceful, splendid angel ran so fast I thought surely I was dead. The living just didn't move like that. _

_Of course, I wasn't gone from this earth; I just didn't realize how close I was._

_I faded in and out of consciousness as the porcelain doll worked above me. I remember hearing her mutter, "Magnificence like this shouldn't be wasted."_

_I woke up, cold and alone, with one thing on my mind; vengeance. I don't know how long I was out, or how long I waited, but she finally returned. _

_Irina. _

_She spent the next several days, maybe weeks, explaining to me what happened. How she found me lying in the street, what she had done to save me, change me, turn me into what she was. _

_Vampire._

_I continued listening in a pure terrified stupor as she explained how she lived, survived, fed, hunted, and roamed. She had a family, and they visited occasionally, but one of them had displeased her. In a flurry like the snow that fell about me when Royce had desecrated my body, Irina's fury over an unnatural commingling between a wolf of the wolds and one of her own saturated me in the flaking ferocity of her growling voice. _

_There was no discussion. She talked, and I listened. She told, and I learned of the myth and legend of my newborn being. Irina took me to hunt. From nighttime stories and lore to scare young children, I knew vampires drank blood, but she was different. She fed off the life-force of animals, a vegetarian of sorts. _

_In time, with no one else to turn to, understanding I'd be six feet under were it not for this intelligent and road-weary otherworldly woman, I allowed Irina to befriend me. We became partners, not in a lover's relationship; we worked together as sisters and allies. _

_We were both scorned women looking for something more. _More_ was only a little girl's fantasies now. Dreams that had shattered around me like a pristine snow globe._

_Irina came up with the plan for my revenge. _

_The two of us had taken up residence in James Island, South Carolina for seven or eight years when she'd chanced upon the idea. Since we could only blame good genetics for so long, it was perfect timing…we needed to move on before the reticent locals figured our puzzle-like existence and un-aging appearance. _

_Back in New York, we located Royce and all of his cronies; it wasn't a hard task, as the papers were littered with their so-called wealthy, privileged accomplishments. I picked them off, one by one, until only Royce survived. I was amused by the notion, for the past two months while I killed, maimed, and tortured Royce's cohorts, he had hidden away from the high society he was so fond of. Fearful, unknowing _who_ he dreaded exactly, I found him, cowering in the corner of a windowless room behind a heavily armed door with two guards standing by. Possessing a flair for the dramatic, I was overly theatrical. It was childish, really. I wore a wedding dress I'd stolen for the occasion. He screamed when he saw me. He bellowed a lot that night. Saving him for last was a good idea — it made it easier for me to control myself, to make the wretched agony slower. _

— I stopped there, not wanting to sound like a crazed lunatic in front of the human woman I'd just met_._

"What happened next, honey?" Mama Brown asked, completely immersed in my story.

"We spent the next sixty-odd years as nomads, lost souls looking for something more. Of_ what,_ we couldn't be certain. Love, comfort, companionship…we had that in each other, but we desperately desired more. I longed for the family I never had, while she mourned the one she lost. We eventually ran across her sisters.

"Irina left me one night a while back," I added sadly, finishing my story. "She said it was time for her to attempt to reconcile with her clan. There was nothing left for me in the North, so I decided to take my chance on the South again. We had done so well in South Carolina before, it couldn't hurt, and there was such a mighty call to me here, so at odds with the advantaged WASP heiress I'd been. That's when I saw your ad for help in the Moultrie News. And, here I am."

"Baby Girl, no use cryin' ova spilt milk, _or blood_, in your case. 'S'all in ta' past. Now, customers 're crude, tips measly, but the job is yours if'n ya want it." I couldn't speak at her kindness. Me, Rosalie Lillian Hale, _speechless!_ It was a sight to see, but Mama's offer was the first real act of kindness anyone had ever shown me, since Irina in her lethal way.

She began giving me the basics, the uniform --_Really Mama, Daisy Dukes?_ I couldn't keep my smart mouth shut, a trait I'd developed through decades of taking care of myself with only one other undead to rely on – my hours (lunch 'til the last patron crawls out), rules (only one rule "don't touch the waitresses"), and basic menu. I started work the next day.

**Mama Brown's – Present Day **

Life is innerestin'. I work at Mama's rain or shine (yeah, I sparkle, what of it. I'm not ashamed like _some_ people). And for fun I have Garrett, my nocturnal nomadic boy toy, the only vamp I let into my territory and my Tommy's. I came across him about fifty years ago while Irina and I made our way across Canada. He drops in on me every few years for a booty call.

Yes, life is good as a Southern gal. That is, until the Cullens showed up_. Vagrant vampires were one thing_. Permanent resident vamps are an entirely different animal, and one I like about as much as raccoon blood. And on my turf! The Lowcountry is my terrain. Every vamp in the area knows this, and the only one I allow to pass through unscathed is Garrett.

Talk about raining on my parade. I've gotten by for so long because I'm a loner. How does it look, six otherworldly beings walking around the small town of Cainwhore? I can only pass on my "good genes" for so long as it is.

Their whole family charade really bothers the shit outta' me. I got no qualms with Esme, she's a saint. But Carl, a Veterinarian, _really_? The man can barely pass for 23, let alone someone who went through college _and_ animal medical school. And their sons; Larry, Curly, and Moe! Someone help the poor town folk of Cainwhore, because this trio is far worse than any natural disaster this area has ever seen.

Edward, or Eddie as he claims to be now, is one emo-ass vampire. That punk has had a hard-on for dear, sweet Bella since the nanosecond he laid eyes on her.

Jasper…well, not much to say except the women, _and men_, of Cain-ho better watch out for his smooth, south-of-Dixie smile. That Texan has a way with words that drops the drawers off better than half this small town.

And that leaves Em, or Bubba, as he's known by the locals.

"Hey, Betty!" Speak of the devil, and he shall appear.

This boy's a real piece of work, from his roughshod boots to his dark, short hair and his brawny chest, taunting me with his insolence, and his erection I can see, like a mast sail, all the way from behind the gleaming formica bartop I continue to polish. _Can't he wait until my shift's over to show up?_ Not fuckin' likely. Bubba'salways here. _Don't he have something better to do than go all crazy stalker on me?_

"Em, how many fucking times do I have to tell you? Do. Not. Call. Me. BETTY! The name is Rose. If that's too hard for you to get through your thick, marble mullet, then Ma'am works just the same. Call me Betty one more time, and I swear to all that's unholy, you will regret ever stepping foot in this here town. Am I clear?"

"Crystal," he forfeits, smiling sweetly. "Can I get a bottle of PBB?"

_See, what'd I tell ya? Thick skull!_

Ignoring the ape as much as possible, I go about my business as usual. The next few hours, _leers and all_, sweep by relatively fast. A few more tables and I'll be home with Garrett; at my cozy house sitting on a quarter acre in the Old Village, worth no less than half a million to the filthy, money-grabbing yuppies slavering for a piece of estate standing edgewise to the sedge and broom and lantana of the Cooper River.

I've got me some pent-up frustration brewin', and Garrett knows exactly how to release it!

I yank my Crackberry - _vampires may be ancient, but we don't live in the Stone Age_ - out of my apron to let Garrett know I'll be along shortly.

_**Almost done, shuga. Be ready and waitin'! R.**_

_**Too late--already here. G.**_

Just as I'm putting my phone away, Garrett walks through the door. _This ought to be good_, Garrett and Bubba in the same room. Lucky me, mind-mentalist Eddie isn't here to pick up on my thoughts. He'd have Emmett out of here faster'n green grass through a goose.

"Can I get you anything else, Em? My date is here, and I don't like to keep a good man waitin' long. If you catch my drift." _Crickets_. Bubba fucking Cullen is speechless!

"Hey baby, this here boy bothering you?" Garrett asks, circling his arms around my waist.

"No, not at all. He was just paying his tab, right _Bubba_?" Again, no words, just movement. Quicker than mortally possible, Em yanks out his wallet, slaps down a twenty and bolts from the diner.

"Was it something I said?" Garrett growls, kissing my cheek.

"Bad bottle of PBB I guess, he's probably got gas," I answer with a smirk. "Let's git goin'."

_~~ll~~_

Now I knew Em had a pressure point, and that _boy_ wouldn't be a problem much longer.

The way he is always hanging around Mama's, well knowing he don't need victuals, the cat calls and the goo-goo eyes, can't a been more clear than a full, sunny day at Isle of Palms beach. Still, a woman like me needs more lucrative advances. It doesn't become one hundred percent clear until I see his reaction to Garrett! I almost choke, which is a large feat when you're as graceful as the long-gone and interred, trying to cover the laughter spilling out my Botticelli lips before it could reach Em's bat-like ears.

Once I send Garrett packing, after having my sweet way with him, I begin to put plan "get Bubba to ask me out" into motion. Yeah, I am a sucker for his golden eyes and dark curly hair, but I can't let _him_ know that. The boy has to work for my affection, and so he has!

I begin by being a little nicer each time I see him, finally deciding after a week he's waited long enough. He shows up that exact morning, no doubt Eddie reading my decision. I saunter over to his table to play nice, _and dirty_. I apologize for the way Garrett behaved, making sure to let Bubba know he'll no longer be passing through…not this village of idiots nor my Daisy Dukes, again. Then, before I walk off, knowing full well everyone in Mama's is watching, I lean in and let him know that if he wants me, he will be mine alone; i.e. he needs to quit fucking around, _now_.

When he asks me out, a tiny sliver of drool over his chiseled chin and a new fat hard-on in his Dickies, I know I have my answer. _He is all mine!_

He's going to pull a "meet the parents" on our first date? I should bail. _Who in their right mind wants that? _And they are no ordinary family! Carl is quietly amusing though he stinks to high hell with his cigar stub and his vet-odor, but Mama Cullen is a whole n'other story. Going off about "_the machine_" like it's a new fangled contraption. I know they're trying to pull off the down home, back woods look to fool the Volturi, but seriously lady, it's 2009, _get with the times_. The only people who don't know how to use computers are sitting at death's door at the old folk's entrance. And the little "baubles" she hands over to me and Alice -- _don't even get me started on the little klepto…I see her stash a few in her purse when Esme isn't looking_ -- is she for real? There is no way I'll be caught wearing them tarnished ornaments on my person, heirlooms or not. I ain't some seventy-year-old lady with blue hair!

After I feel I play the charade of the good girlfriend long enough, it's time for Bubba and me to have our date. If I get my way, that boy won't be walking straight for a month!

Save a stallion, ride a vampire!

* * *

~Cheers, **Jaspersbrand**; you've done fine justice to Rose and Mama Brown, thank you! Be sure to check out her own fic, _Wonderwall. And, for the love of Rose, don't forget to review!_~

New Dead Confederates later this week; see you at the Double Wide!


	7. Sweetgrass and Sassafras

I'm a very lucky gal to have both **vanessarae and Viola Cornuta **as my betas, as well as having the pleasure (often crude and many times unbelievably wondrous) of the company of the DW h00rs!

**Disclaimer: **Yeah, I'm totally owning this. Mama Brown is mine.

~~Well, this is weird. An outtake that I actually wrote my little old self? Yes, it's true!~~

* * *

**Sweetgrass and Sassafras**

My l'il momma seemed in a bad way.

Not the brightly-plumaged Carolina wren I was used to, with her wit and smile usually hiding the little rolled-up threads of hurt inside her.

A little bit dull; her feathers molting.

I was sweeping up the dust of dried pluff mud from the bare, unsanded floor when she came in just before opening, later than usual and missing the spring in her step.

Part of me wanted to swat her behind and tell her to get over it already and the other half of me, the mammy I never was--least not in my own person or from my own body--begged to take hold of that young woman and press her to my soft, round form and feed her up on comfort foods; take away her pain.

I nodded to her and kept on a' brushin'…_well, now she knew the truth._

She'd come to me when she was ready to talk.

They all did.

They were called to me, like incantations. These resilient young women, mortal and death-bound alike. Each one had a strong toehold in the graves being dug-up and paved over in this place, whether they knew it or not.

Now, my Rose? The night she sat at the bar, a damn queen of gold and robustness, her wings had been busted up more than once. Ah could tell she wasn't one for self-pity or moroseness, but the woman had been raped by many, including the man she'd wanted to love her, and then turned into an otherworldly spirit who would never know the walk to Heaven's gates.

My Gullah traditions made me know the existence of hags and haunts, though this youthful immortal could never be described by those insulting words; she was certainly as _other_ as all the devils I'd heard-tell about.

Dragged through the gutters, she'd been. Hung out to dry.

She seemed parched, for affection.

I had that to give in spades.

I'da offered her a mug of warmed milk, but I knew she wanted something richer I couldn't provide.

She hankered after a family, a baby, in ways I understood.

I had a truth in me. It let me see inside of others, to make out what they were. It weren't no conjuring or gypsy vision, just the plain truth of a person. Genuine or deceitful, human or creature.

In offering her a job, I gave her my protection and a heaping of my unused maternal love. Sittin' behind the cash register, I watched her tease on the locals with her ungodly good looks and her viperish tongue.

Many a time I hid my guffaws like broken cattails behind a fan of five dollar bills at her antics!

No matter what my Rose thought, she was full up of life.

Didn't hurt that our takings tripled with her waitressing.

Or that she used her vampire strength to rid the diner, and oftentimes the world, of skanky, skunky foul men who thought, just like her disgusting Royce, a woman's body was theirs to be manhandled.

I never blinked an eye at what she was.

Interesting goings-on started up with the Cullens' arrival. They was rowdy boys! I guess they had nothing better to do than drive from Cainhoy to the outpost of Mount Pleasant, what with their non-sleeping ways.

Rose was less than pleased and showed it with her attitude toward the brothers three, but I liked she got as good as she gave for a change.

And they were heavy tippers, though they never ordered more than a few rounds of PBR, spiking it with shots of blood from their polished, silver flasks.

Ah didn't mind, as they enlivened the place; rednecks, black men, geezers alike. The Miles and Simmons, the Johnnys and Billys, and the upperclass who liked my homemade, smokehouse barbeque, the Coopers and Legares… they was all polite in my establishment and treated each other with the respect of man for man, no matter color or religion or upbringing.

Now just 'cause I was a free thinker didn't mean I lacked understandin' about capitalism and how to enterprise on my holdins. _No ma'am._ The men paid for my food, and I paid my women for their work… it just so happened they wore uniforms that aided in the rough shack's side-splittin' seams at lunchtime.

No one crossed the line because I'd lynch 'em out back on my gallow's tree.

Until one Esquire Eddie Cullen and his brother Bubba.

That Eddie, well he was a one. Never saw him bat one of his girlishly long eyelashes over no one! Not 'til he saw l'il momma, and she tripped right into him when he opened the door. Almost swishing to her, I beat back my instincts and let life take its course. He caught her, held her, and an instant of feeling wrapped him into her, 'gainst everything he thought he was. A monster, and an undeservin' one at that.

He and Bubba found a table, and Bella fumbled away. I just knew she'd been touched by him, in her soul. In the back of my mind, I saw a blush ride over his chops and cheeks, his knee jumped to the tune of music that wasn't playing on the quiet jukebox, he twiddled with a straw until it laid in a plastic pile of curly-cues on the tabletop.

_Just one look._

I sputtered out the back door when he couldn't even bring himself to speak to her, this big, brawny beast who'd had women from here to Ravenel and back again with not a damn care in the world, kicking up his devil heels with the red grin on his lips.

Slipping my head back in the shack, kicking the squealing pigs out my way, I craned for another look when the silence grew too much. Bella was taking their order because Rose was stomping away, only stopping to tip over the Sheriff's chair, shaking her bosom in his face because she damn well knew Em was taking note of her every action.

Eddie'd like to grab her pad and pencil. His eyes were damn near midnight as they slit up her bare legs, tight shorts, tied-up shirt.

And Bubba raced to Rose and grabbed her ass!

This was more fun than a pig-pullin' at Snowden!

Jazz, he frequented my eatery less often. Boy was busy! A free-lovin' soul taking his plight to heart and turning it into a splendid thing – well, that cherub held onto no bounds, givin' his body wherever he saw fit with not a whit of worry but for the mossy, moseying carnage of his past.

I hadn't met their Alice yet, but ah sure did want to.

_~~ll~~_

With a strong gait and gathered air, Miss Bella had answered my Help Wanted sign.

I only put it up when I knew there was someone out there who needed me as much as I needed them.

And so she came to me.

_L'il momma._

Oh she was jaded as the rest of them, but how she managed to maintain an innocence! She didn't take no guff, and gave as good as she got, but…Miss Bella was purity, and an honesty.

I didn't ken I was putting something bigger into motion.

_She was meant for something beyond this muggy bottom swamp._

As were they all. I was just a bystander.

She wore that darned music thing about her neck and in her back pocket incessantly. If she wasn't chattering to the customers or clucking, surface-like only, with me and Rose, she had those things in her ears.

And it weren't her only shield.

I saw the truth.

How much my l'il momma'd been through! Making her way right down to these parts from up North and from a mam who didn't deserve her, to be delivered to me, and a coven of vampires.

There was legends written upon her skin.

Sheriff Swan? 'Course I knew him. Every two weeks, of a Saturday, he came in for his yellow bbq sandwich. Peacekeeper. He was one cloudy feller, for I could hardly get a read on him. From town gossip I did know he'd had his fair share of heartache with his uppity wayfaring woman.

I hired Bella.

Well, I knew she and Rose would start up a most unlikely friendship. And how Rose came alive with her first human girlfriend in near-on a century! Even her dam Irinahadn't meant as much, because she'd left. As had everyone in Rose's life.

Bella seemed to have a mightier pull over the paranormal than I did.

It started with the Cullens and then it was the Blacks, except she'd known about them most all her life.

Tying up her little starched apron and pushing her order pad to her pocket and pencil into her hair, Bella sat on a stool and reached over to pour herself a coffee. I took up residence behind bar, polishing tumblers and checking the pastries, setting out dishes for the morning run.

Caleb clattered in the kitchen and the hens squawked out back.

Mockingbirds and grackles chattered noisily, and the osprey swooped down to the crick.

She lifted the canister of sugar and watched a sandspill slide in her mug. Woman had the heart of a hummingbird!

Stirring with a spoon, she let it clatter to the bartop and slurped her coffee before wiping her mouth and just tellin' it to me straight, "Well, Mama, Eddie just ain't natural." She hung down low into a marshy southern accent I 'spected came over her more pronounced in my presence.

"Mmmm, hmmm," I agreed and kept up my rubbing.

"And it ain't just him. Rose too!" _Oh, ho! She wanted a reaction about that!_

Her hand shook coffee over the brim of the cup before I held her still. This would make her stronger, or this would hurt her more, but I'd be damned if I'd hold their secrets inside me any longer, "Baby, I know it all."

She ingested implication and insight and incising wisdom and wanted to run, but unlike her Eddie, I held her still.

"Honey, you may think what you like of these people. But we make them ours. And you might want to run away from me, your man, your very closest friend, but didn't one part of you know all along?"

Sliding the heavy ceramic mug in between her hands, she shifted on the stool and took up my scripture.

Bella nodded.

_She'd known, somewhere, within all this._

A chickadee, warbling, unsteady and unlike her, "I just don't know what to do."

"Well," I tapped my head and then her heart, "You go with your feelins**.**"

~~ll~~

Few knew it, by I was called Cassandra.

My mammy had a yearning for the classics. As if the name was a harbinger for my gifts that could only be explained through the lines of my matrilineage broken by slavery, it was like I was the princess whose ears were licked clean by serpents so I could see faint fireflies of future, and understood the tongue of people-like-animals and monsters.

My mam had been a maid at Wide Awake Plantation in Hollywood out on rural route 17, sitting over the Stono River. Just as her mother before her. My grandpappy had been a rice driver at that same plantation and our history ran back so far and deep down here in this south it almost touched the Ogeechee River.

My daddy was with us 'til his death at such a terribly young age. A longshoreman on the Cooper River's bustling terminus, he'd been crushed by an iron crate in a gruesome dock accident.

He was a strong man, my father, Eugene. Solid and dependable, but the one thing about him I remembered most, he loved to grab right onto life almost as much as he loved to grab onto my momma's big, bold curves, swinging her about the room I still stood over every day. Then there'd been just bars linin' the walls, and the workers sat shoulder to shoulder, and we din't brook no discrimination. And everyone knew it: Mama Brown's was where the uptown, downtown, and all-around-town mingled.

Oh times had changed, we were allowed mates, and to keep them, but whereas _that_ Cassandra didn't return Apollo's attentions, I'd had many, just not any one for long enough.

In 1956, my mammy bought up this little shack, put out a hand-painted sign, and set off to sell some sweetgrass baskets and barbecue.

She turned a small profit right off, and I carried on the tradition after she passed at the end of the 20th century, as if she really didn't think she wanted to see another era come in. Changing hardly a thing, I kept the tradition, the recipes, the holdings, and we even gave Jestine's Kitchen, downtown on Meeting Street, a run for their greenbacks.

Caleb took off near every early morning on his twin-speed to Boone Hall Creek to gather up the bundles of nature's grown, free offering we used to make our sought-after baskets in our spare time, narrowly missed by drivers zipping in their BMW bubbles up Longpoint Road to 526.

Too much haste for this place, too little thought.

The sun weren't near enough sucking the gray from the night's clouds when Caleb hollered to me from the back of my quarters that ran adjacent from the Diner. "Hogs is ready to turn, Mama!"

He lived in the shanty behind the house. I'd come upon him on Ben Sawyer Boulevard, his knapsack on his back and bleeding his wares and ownings, his nappy head tore up over the loss of his livelihood from this dastardly recession shaking the shingle from roofs. To add insult to injury, he'd been waylaid by a ne'er-do-well on his tramp east from Georgia, who stole ever damn thing but five measly bucks off him. My trusting boy had just wanted a ride down the road.

Rose took one look at the busted-up man and set off on her warpath. I knew I couldn't stop her. I didn't ask no questions when she returned, a satisfied smile on her red-trimmed lips.

Skinny as a rail, he was. I fed him up on fat pork steaks, fried catfish, okra, and peach cobbler. Din't matter, he was still a lanky beanpole resembling nothin' more'n a two-by-four.

I never had a man of mah own, to keep and spole. Just too much business going on.

I rolled from my bed, and the iron frame from Pages Thieves Market just down the road groaned.

I still looked good. Rotund, voluptuous, I could turn an eye sure enough. Men liked them some plush handholds and soothing, and I had that to give a'plenty.

Out the back door I swung with a wrap around me; roosters nesting from their coops crowed and made like Egyptians with their strut of neck. I shooed at them as I scattered feed.

A truck was already out front, the driver sitting stony still.

It was five a.m.

He slept less than me.

_He_ knew more than me.

And he was hurtin' bad.

I never had none of my own. Just couldn't seem to make my body hold onto those little babies.

So, my waitresses were my own kin...Rose and Bella, as was Caleb.

Turning the spit, the red glow reminded me of the way his eyes burned sometimes. Had done, anyway. Before Miss Bella.

I tucked into a loose skirt and fitted blouse, rolled my hair in a kerchief so the open fire couldn't get to my rows. Opening the cooler, I ripped the top off a Pabst and opened the front door to my restaurant.

Knocking on his window until he turned his sad, lapsed, inhuman eyes to me, his jaw working like over a pull of hamhocks, he looked to me and wound down the window.

"Sonny, don't you take nuthin' to heart, you hear?"

He glugged back the liquid and I homed in on the venom wetting the bottle top. When he'd had his fill, he placed the bottle so gently back into my waiting hand with a strongly felt, "Thank you, ma'am."

Oh be still mah heart! Here he was, a vampire, in love with a human woman, feelin' himself on the brink of despair, but he still remembered his manners. That Miss Esme had taught him well.

"Now, I know what y'are. And so does she," I reached through, tough and brown and magisterial, my fingers clapped to the pale and white and imperial width of his wrist on the steering wheel. "You give her some time, okay?"

He swallowed against emotion, not the beer I'd brought him. Nodding and agreeing, he turned the engine to leave.

"Eddie Cullen! You sit tight!" I put my bare foot, ashy with the white sand and gravel dust of the lot, before his front tire. "She'll be here at ten."

Gratified, he smiled, but it wasn't the lifting I'd grown used to on his perfect, and destroyed, face.

I wanted to cuddle this man and let him know it'd all be a'right.

Instead, I heaved away with the muggy May air and the sea salt from Sullivan's Island deeper and damper in my lungs than a cheroot, "Park 'round back. You can stay, but don't you go all stalker on me, or I'll boot your hide from one end of the lowcountry to th'other. Caleb'll bring you another beer when he gits back. And just you hold on, son."

With the Acadian shapeshifters, the bloodsuckers, my girls Rose and Bella… these times were changin'. Bella held the key. With her man.

Like the Grecian Cassandra who foretold the sacking of Troy, I knew a swift and deadly battle was coming.

I'd mopped up, sopped up, supped beside 'em. Served them, consoled them, counseled and hoped for them.

Now, I'd watch over these chirrun like they were my own. Because, there was a storm brewin', the likes of which I'd never seen.

* * *

~What did you think of Mama? Do tell!~

I'll try to be real quick here:

Eddie was nominated in the **Golden Lemon Awards **for Best Oral – SWEET! You remember the shower scene, right? My _Comeuppance _was also nommed for best Make-Up Sex too! So, go now and vote for your fave lemons at goldenlemonawards(DOT)com.

I started writing a new story, and I will keep harping on about it: _Youth Without Age and Life Without Death._ I also wrote a second chapter to my o/s _Surrender_.

Some of my shit is up for **Indies** as soon as the validation process finishes, so stay tuned.

What? What's that you say? ****_Where's Eddie?!!!!****_ Oh, Eddie, he's gonna' chat with y'all this week, as soon as we finish _beating out_ the chapter. You know you won't be disappointed; man's saved up a lot of yarns and, um…_other things_ for you ;).


	8. Crucible

Thanks to the most lovely betas – Vanessarae and Viola Cornuta…it's crazy what they let me get up to!

Lorelei and KatHat, y'all made my brain bleed for this one – yup, your reviews totally made this.

Sassy, saucy love to the DW h00rs and the Fuckbook femmes. Eddie sends y'all an ass-slap and rub.

There was one phrase I borrowed from mine and blondie AKA robin's _The Bride of Edward Cullen_ (if you're looking for more dark hilarity, you should check it out – we post under the name SinisterSisterhood, link on my profile, hey, that bitch even won Les Femmes Noires contest, just heed the warnings.)

Disclaimer: Hers, mine, ours, mine?

~~This one written by yours truly. You know, I said this would be Aro, but I lied. Everyone does Aro – he's washed up, a has-been. This one's quite dark, but also ridiculously funny. At least I think so, then again perhaps I'm just twisted and demented. You can tell me in a _review_~~

* * *

**Crucible**

If you promise to be quiet and listen well, _children_, I'll tell you a little bedtime story. I hope it gives you as many sleepless nights as I have known. Pull up your settee while I settle to my sovereign seat--my old-fashioned furniture may look antiquated, but I assure it is quite comfortable enough even for the modern posterior--and let me tell you about the birth of a bloody nation.

We weren't created. Not turned or ruined. We were generated as vampires in 1000 BC. _Considering my age, I think I still cut a rather fine figure, wouldn't you agree?_ With the queen of the Seraphim Aro's mother, her sisters the bearers of myself and Marcus; Lucifer our father, we three were near-gods, near-devils. _Burning ones_, the beings who had given birth to us were _drakones_, standing nearest the throne of God. They were the excess of charity; the three sisters glutted with goodness turned to excitation and furor. Unbearably bright, one's retinas burned to look at them with their wings covering their faces in shame at their downfall, another pair sheltering their bodies, and two down below with which to fly away from travesty as they fled from us as soon as we were released unto the world.

Our sire was the fallen angel, the light bearer, the Morning Star.

It would seem we were both beatified and doomed from the start.

Thank some deity or other we weren't born with the plumage of cherubim. I may have been, _how do you say it?_ 'light in the loafers' but even I didn't want be known as a fairy. Dark, avenging angel, perhaps.

Didyme, the issue of Seraphiel and Zeboul, was Aro's half sister.

Chanting Trisagion--_kadosh, kadosh, kadosh–_we were the mutations of devil and angel. From nascence, the duality of our nature was a slim, taut, unraveling wire. To protect, to murder. To guide, to destroy.

If given the choice, _my sweet-smelling audience_, which impulse would you choose? Now, now, don't get all up in arms; it was merely a rhetorical question. Of course, you benevolent people would opt for integrity. _Of course you would, just as we had, in the beginning of time._

To use our gifts for good or evil? With a touch, Aro could read every meandering thought ever fashioned in his prey's life or in his liege's existence. In tune with the workings of the heart, the one thing we would never possess, Marcus understood the cloud-like formations, the zephyr and zenith of relationships. The two of them imagined me a lesser brother, and I welcomed my time in the sooty shadows. I heard them whispering like wee girls gossiping that I was no more than a mistake from our progenitors, as if they should have used contraception against my inception. _What is my ability, you ask?_ Well, _friends_, you're lucky I'm in such a grand mood I'll put up with your insolence… _this once._

Do you not know me? I'm the keeper of the clan's secrets. I'm the puppet master, the ventriloquist. So talented am I that not even my omniscient brother has fathomed my string-pulling. Marcus sees nothing but a blind, blue, astigmatic ribbon flittering here and there, and never settling for long enough to be of concern. _That's because my one devotion is to __myself._

Staunch and loyal and seemingly unquestioning, the two vampires perceived me as nothing more than a lynch pin holding the entire fucked-up family together as we walked the earth, taking as we wanted, giving as needed.

_Where did the name Volturi come from?_ I believe Aro thought it was… what's your slang… _badass_. Voltage, current, live wire, volcanic, erupting, disruptive, punitive, destructive. You can blame him for that bastardization. At any rate, I don't believe I said it was question time yet, so quiet down, _bambini_, before you put me in a foul mood.

Alone of all of us, Didyme received a goddess' helping of lightness. An unadulterated, incredibleness of being; a gift for happiness and joy, an effervescence of spirit. She never wavered nor swayed; in most arenas her delight was childlike, you young people would have gotten along with her famously–it's simply such a shame she died before her time. When it came to food and wanton desires, even her avarice was untainted by guilt.

A book written tens of thousands of years before, all of her words were inscribed with no need to ponder the meaning behind them. There was no subtext on the illumined pages of her leatherbound manuscript.

She was a tiny piece of purity.

In the beginning, there was little choice. Opening wide, the world was a working of monstrosity mating with sublime splendor.

We were naïve creatures, bred of right and good and wrong and wicked. We were but full-grown, lethal imps blessed with purity fighting putrefaction. Taking what we wanted, we were devil-gods who flourished, unencountered, unencumbered, unoccupied but for the fulfillment of our flesh.

Pandora's plenteous box spilled open. An apple rotted. As humanity erupted around us and civilization fledged, the serpentine paradox of our equally intense impulses grew too much to bear, and we sequestered ourselves away. As a pyramid, we built our domain: Volterra; constructed, block upon block, a palace, a barricaded sanctuary to bliss and beastly deeds.

Light and dark encapsulated us. Time never stopped, but we did.

Within our escarpment, with keen excitement and equal disgust, we observed the time lapse of culture and civilization taking root around us. Brick, stone, cobble, mortar, scaling new heights. Towers, spires, religion, government. War, art, conquests and epidemics spreading tendrils in bubonic proportions.

The building blocks of centuries were constructed, step-by-step to a new pinnacle every one hundred years before the entire thing was razed to the earth's depths only to begin again.

Humans were nearly as indestructible as we. Founded on hope and optimism and the idea of righteousness, they spilled blood with thoughts of religious justice running through their veins, and managed to hold their heads high above the manglings.

In denial.

I never scorned my lusts. I knew where my true feelings and passions lay.

Furthermore, as the Volturi, at least we understood what we were, and honestly acknowledged our less-than virtuous nature.

Impounded in our castle, _our town,_ our many grew with me and my half-brothers always at the center. The newborns and reared guard and trained assassins slithered around the labyrinth, tottering, postulating, pustulating, piercing. _Fucking._ Funning. In those days gone by, we were little more than a commune of monsters with similar diets and a love for the luxurious. There was no treatise or charter… one needed only to show obsequience and acceptance.

Plebs and workers bees; Didyme was the Queen of the colony but only because of birth, and not for much longer. Would I be sad to see her go? Not really, she didn't have the proper _equipment_ and I was more queen than she.

For a time, beauty won out. Albeit there was splendor stained by the necessary murder of human beings. We cultivated a standard of civilization through appreciation of art, collections of tomes, discussion of the allegedly brightest minds of each decade.

I liked this epoch…I was all about setting the scene for my trysts, and there were so many props to choose from. I believe you'd say I was 'out of the closet' by this time, _si_? Unlike the others, my collections involved newly bred vampires with excellent stamina, human men I liked to fuck before I bled them in ecstasy; and Felix, my long-standing lover.

I was certain he was just using me to solidify his station in the guard, but with his cock and talented tongue I didn't bother to question his motives.

I did make time to get a petition in order regarding the unsightly robes Aro had us prancing about in. Every time I put the cassock on I felt a wave of nausea. Firstly, black did nothing for my skin tone. Secondly, the cut was hardly flattering to my sculpted form. And just… _why?_ Robes? Was this the Religion of the Loogaroo?

Aro shredded the long list of signed names with his aristocratic eyebrow raised and his long, hooked nose curling up in derision.

That was the end of that.

The next morning at 'mass', and by _mass_ I mean _mass murder, _I took my seat decidedly unclothed beneath the wieldy, woolen cloth. _I believe you Westerners would say I 'went commando'._

I smirked at Arsehole.

He rolled his eyes and looked down to the gathered feast of flittering human hearts, clapped his hands twice to anoint the banquet, and then flesh _thalumped_ against the abattoir's walls.

_What a lovely sound._

I always expected him to don an ecru linen serviette to the collar of his gown before going down, so as not to splatter the pristine garb.

He held the goblet delivered to him by whorish Heidi like it was one of the Limoges tea cups entombed in our vaults, his pinky finger turned just so.

_And he really thought he wasn't queer?_

Over and under and through it all was craven decadence. In heaps of naked, nubile bodies writhing, those who were making love, those who were made into meals, new hedonism inspired idealism of a twisted sort in Aro.

In an effort to reshape our own vampire world after the decree of democracy shaping the New World, Aro became the self-proclaimed king and called for order; he bade our fiendish necromancing brothers and sisters to lay low, to follow his rule, to pave a governed way safeguarding our existence.

Most heeded his law. In the meantime, I went down on enough boys to give a mortal lockjaw. Volterra became the standard for vampire excellence. And we did excel.

_Me? Most decidedly in the boudoir._

For a time, Aro was spoiled by his own altruism, thinking himself a god instead of a devil. _And I thought _I_ was vain._ He'd settle for nothing more than president of these denizens of death.

Sightseeing through human nature, at first we created our own Nirvana, learning from their mistakes.

Pontificating, we congressed and conversed on every foul, mortal, brutal instance of history.

We saw it all.

_None saw us._

And because of his example, he thought it would remain so.

Lethal and evil and damaged. Too much incest, too much time. Too much of any little item**, **replete body, ready skin, red blood **. **Too easy. Nepotism, simony, blight and broiling brutality. Isolated and insular and inward-looking.

Excess rivered through our veins.

It was only a matter of time, time that tiptoed forward, brushing away minutes from its path, like the fall of limbs and torsos and heads decapitated, before wastefulness and debauchery and depravity descended.

I can't say I was surprised, _piccoli cari_, or even that I was particularly upset with the turn of events.

More bodies, more blood, more sex, more action–more, more, more, more! I hungered for the madness. I'd become a bit bored by our forced gentility.

The midnight killing world outside our den became degenerate. Silently, I clasped my hands and often took a front row seat in the theatre of vampyre nature. A most perverse killjoy, Aro called order, a round table where everyone had a say as he asked, "Who will stop the humans from discovering us when those disobedient of our kind display drained corpses in midday? What will stop them from finding us? To give name to us, _Vampire_, will be our death knell. A crusade will be born! Us or them?"

He pounded the vast pedestal table at which sat our comrades, followers, brothers, sisters. Gleefully, I cackled at his pseudo-thespian manner. Marcus inspected his nails and made moon-eyes at Didyme, which seemed entirely daft given our half-brother's narcissistic tendencies and immature need to be loved the most by each and every one of us.

I snickered at dear Didyme's innocent cameo in Marcus' lovelorn heart. I hid a mealy grin when she returned his regard, excitedly awaiting the annihilation their growing affection would cause.

When you've lived for a millennium, what else is there but the scurrilous misdeeds of your own kind to bring refreshing titillation?

But back to the story, _tesori_. I wouldn't want to bore you; I know you're just as bloodthirsty as me.

Submissively, all the king's men and women nodded their heads, their savage grins grew, their muscles tightened for the nightlit wars to come.

_Animals, each and every one of them–this was our vital connection._

Simple actions began the unfurling of yearning for endless power. A nightwalker in Romania made a slapdash bloody splash in the middle of a village square on market day, and we descended. In black, glittering as jet gemstone, a swish and sway, an army in two lines floating in formation with our billowing cloaks sweeping earth to dust and motes of grit. I halted the rear of the swayback column to brush specks of filth from my odious drapery. Aro wasn't amused, thus I was highly entertained.

Birds silenced, people were already asleep, nocturnal insects found cover, and rats and mice and other varmint scampered with their bellies to the ground in search of safety. Our heads hooded, our eyes sharp as hawks, our fingers curled, the carnelian slash of a flag, our standard, billowed ripe like pomegranate pulp in the air at the tail end of our snakelike, two-tiered formation.

The rogue vampire saw doom as it approached.

We didn't need to show our colors for him to know.

There was nothing other than Aro's unparalleled arrogance that caused him to gather all of his soldiers. He liked the swagger, the pomp and circumstance; on this point, we agreed.

The lassitude of sexual assignations–every day a new orgy of flesh in every permutation possible–and the suckling of life force from sentient beings of a night…it would never have lasted. More's the pity, and yet there was so much fun to be had.

This hunt and siege was only the first step.

Our kibbutz grew. Collecting humans instead of simply ingesting their blood, we gathered the most brilliant.

Insignificant, little, breakable jewels to complement our crowning glory; this was most certainly an enjoyable era. Like a slave bazaar, the gifts of humans were paraded before us as our drones tried to outdo one another for our esteem. Yes, _dear one_s, it was a pageant of pretty, trembling flesh that incited me so much I could rarely withhold my urges.

When given to me, I played with the earth-bound creatures first. A wee dip before I dined on the handsome men–certainly we weren't outfitting our army with ugly specimens. If they were very good, and appropriately servile, I'd take them to orgasm _just before_ I scored them from head to toe with my polished incisors.

The blood was so tasty, the sex so sybaritic, it was difficult to stop.

Once or twice I didn't bother to.

Jane and Alec were our first acquisitions in this manner. Fine examples they were; though we had thought to wait until they were older, their extraordinary attributes made the humans far too happy to burn them at the stake.

Alec became my alternate… _what is that cunning little phrase you have?_... 'boy-toy' when I tired of Felix's brawny bedside manner. Young Alec was so naughty with his talent for deadening every emotion–I so enjoyed his parlor trick I often had him use it on me. Like a Dominant, he withheld me from motion and sight and sound until all but sensation was illicitly heightened and I came and came and came.

With my power, I bestowed affection to those in favor, curtly shirking those that were not.

Jealousies bred.

Jezebels abounded.

Infighting embroiled.

A stalemate.

Aro would _not _have that.

How I loved it when he went all Nero on our disciples.

However, when he singled out Felix, I wanted to rip Aro's limp-wristed hands from his arms and shove them up his virgin asshole. I clenched down, my eyes widened into a sanguine stare. He approached my Palermo paramour. I watched in stony disbelief and one instance of horror as my brother touched my lover. A shiver of recognition and revulsion passed between the two; Aro at Felix's fornication with me, Felix at Aro's concupiscence with Jane.

I was rather shocked, which was a new feeling, that Aro would take my plaything before he made an example out of Marcus and Didyme. I'd willfully forgotten his flair for the unexpected.

Continuing to elucidate his lesson, he stood in the middle of our meeting chamber, a cold, clammy en-ronde with the only light from the drowning sun silting down in warm dust sprinkles from the garrison's high, narrow windows. Felix at his side, imagining himself to be safeguarded from harm, Aro spoke with quiet puissance, "If you insist on fighting amongst yourselves, justice will be dealt swiftly."

Foolish, neglectful, harbored Felix had let his loose mouth and allowed his looser morals get the better of him, it appeared. He'd been caught with a noose around his neck instead of the usual cock in his mouth when he'd mentioned to Demetri there was a better man for Aro's job.

Aro's voice stabbed like a foil, "_And_, you must never take _this_ Lord's name in vain."

For the first time, fear strangled me, longing unseated me. I made to pounce from the dais to take down Aro, but Marcus's hand cuffed me to the chair, "His torture will be far worse if you intervene, _brother._"

The curdling aversion paralyzing me tasted like rotten iron beneath my tongue. My lips curled over growls, snarls, hisses.

Aro scoffed in my direction, "Now, now, Caius, don't get your pantywaist in a knot. _All good things must come to an end._"

At that, he cropped Felix's head from his shoulders and pitched it with a smoky explosion to the far wall. His chest, legs, and arms twitched a few times as they were sheared apart. One imperial finger lifted, and Chelsea was beckoned forward to set blaze to my charcoal lover.

Scuffing through the ashen pile he'd made so a gray flurry dimmed the already muted light, Aro counseled, "Let that be a lesson, _my children._"

In the square, evening vespers were heard; courtiers were squiring their mistresses about. Hot, full-bodied drinks on legs walked just outside the castle. Murderous Aro gathered up his gloomy cloak, walked across air that didn't touch his feet, to Heidi, and held her while he demanded, "I'm hungry now, dear."

_Precious ones_, I did mourn my loss. For a week or two; you must understand that's tantamount to a year for those of our makeup. You mustn't think ill of me that I found solace, and ecstasy, in Alec's inebriating arms as well as those of our latest newborn, Giacometti.

When I was in a particularly wicked mood, I'd slap his ass while I rode him and riled him further by calling him the Americanized version of his name, Jack.

What happened next, you want to know? My, my, but you are an impudent, impatient audience. I'll indulge you, this once. _What happened next_ set the steel wheels in motion that pitted the Volturi against the Cullens.

To eclipse the uncivil war at hand, Aro rose above all others. To the highest throne, the King of the Vultures, I mean us Volturi, _of course_. At either side, Marcus and I reclined; Aro made sure he was at the pinnacle of our pyramid. At his back stood sentient sentinel Chelsea and below his feet perched Didyme.

Alec and Jane stood in their petite, wraith-like, wrathful glory like half-columns, flanking his carved, winged chair.

When the insouciant mood struck me, I reached back to fondle Alec's fig-like sac, giving him a jaunty wink.

Ever the insane strategist, Aro decided it was time to revive the fighting spirit and to take the glare off his royal heinousness.

_Didyme._

She thought he didn't know.

How green and untainted she'd remained!

Beautiful, pale in a regal manner, obsidian and glowing of tresses, she saw the passing of years less than any I'd ever met, even for our own kind.

Her red lips curved into fullness whenever she smiled at Marcus. And he simpered back. When they touched, as if in innocence, electric charges sparked like the brain's synapses into the air.

I should have warned Marcus as he'd protected me, but I just didn't really give a toss.

What's that quaint American saying? _Always the bridesmaid, never the bride?_ Yes, that summed up my voyeurism as I untangled Aro's growing displeasure with the two quiet lovers. I watched from the vestibule as his venom tipped up over his teeth until he resembled a slavering shape-shifter.

It simply didn't bode well to forge a bond with anyone other than H-R-Hiney.

Just cast your eyes to Edward–_oh, I'm sorry, it's Eddie now, isn't it_–and _la sua storia_. Just look at what happened to my Felix.

As if I could read the Greek tragedy in his head, I knew at once what Aro was mulling over as his florin, fevered eyes loitered and narrowed spitefully. He couldn't have Didyme undermining his self-appointed role as savior, saint, king. Her allegiance had to be to him alone. Her growing affection for Marcus threatened the stability of our domain, or so he thought.

He unraveled the bafflement with his clever, maniacal mind.

_Which tie to sever?_

_Which life to end?_

They'd grown so fastly over each other it would be like separating lichen from stone.

He chose.

_He killed._

I knew. It was another secret to add to my stash.

One night while on a torch-lit witchhunt, Aro swept over his sister's back and strafed his talons and teeth against her flesh. I'd followed, not to save but to archive. The blade against marble was screechy… Didyme's scream was creepy. Her innocence bled out in silvery, shiny streams. He hurled her arms and legs and torso, he ignited the pieces. Lastly, he gathered her severed, gasping head in his lap amongst the folds of endless foul fabric–_he still insisted on demeaning any sense of fashion with the most abominable robes._ Cradling the skull like it was a baby, remorse bent his old shoulders for one moment before he looked away to light her hair on fire with trembling hands.

Didyme had looked so pretty memorialized in death before the crackling blaze set her alight. No longer able to speak or lisp, her innate quietness was entombed with her.

I alone knew of this travesty.

Until Edward came along.

Sickened by Aro's sororicide, I concurrently applauded his complete lack of decency.

Still, I comforted Marcus in his bereavement; that went on, and on, and _fucking_ on to this very day.

Feeling no compunction at all, Aro blamed Didyme's death on Vladimir and Stefan. They'd always been haughty and pompous, full of airs and ways that solidified them as a duo apart from the rest of us.

I couldn't say I blamed him for that sleight of hand.

The young ones were so easy to cajole, connive, corrupt… it was laughable.

Escaping quickly, Stefan and Vladimir fled to Romania and the remainder of their family. With a curse of ages that lit the sky over all the world like a flash of lightning from the crevasse of purgatory itself, they managed to keep our bedeviled army at bay.

_For now._

A sweet, handsome, naïve young thing by the name of Carlisle Cullen showed up at our palace in the 1700's seeking learning and sanctuary. We called him Stregoni Benefici. He didn't stay long enough for us to sway him to our vision for one united nation of killer-keepers. Ingesting our archaic volumes, making do with deer, sheep, and cow, he didn't deign to join our dining table or tribunal.

Oddly, Aro struck up an unlikely friendship with the man of learning and let him go on his way.

Our trackers followed him, straight from Volterra to Romania.

Even then, Aro didn't bat a skinny albino eyelash.

I wasn't the only one under the spell of the young, blond, doctor-to-be.

During all these hundreds of years, we didn't stop our expunging, our ethnic cleansing. Centuries , two more centuries. Time would never stop, so long as I lived. Aro alone fulfilled his birthright, a son of Hades. As soon as he'd come across Didyme's staged death, Marcus fell into an empty hole. A carcass, a husk of nothing, at least a good kill brought yearning back to dance in his heathen's eyes and some color to his weak spleen. I made merry, seemingly a lascivious lamb, biding my time to overthrow the Republic of Aro.

The advent of Alice provided a year of amusement in the 1920s. It was fun to watch Aro being outdone by one of our own. A miniature mind-reaper, we'd heard from our scouts that the Mississippian could foretell the future. She'd been locked away in an asylum by her parents, those god-blessed people, and made to endure shock treatments; mocked for her untamed, unilateral skill at prophecy.

Of course we wanted her, _my darlings._

The way she slipped through our hands still galled Aro–she was the pinafored midget who fell down the rabbit hole--and caused me to crow, when alone in my chambers. Outdone and bested by his own infantryman, Aro had bellowed so loudly even the lead panes of our stockade shattered! Marcus jutted awake from his nonsense narcolepsy. All the youngsters ran hither and thither, the elders and guard held their breath to see who would die next.

James had gotten to Alice first. Obviously he was excommunicated, exiled, and his execution would be swift.

Interminable decades passed with no word. Aro was beside himself with asperity. One day we received a missive from a nobody by the name of J. Jenks that he knew of a vampire-dame named Alice and that the mignon had assassinated her sire, James.

The minion moved to the top of the most desired scroll.

Everything sped up, gloriously so.

The twentieth century was shaping up just fine.

In the mid-1990s we had unexpected guests. They arrived, unannounced–_which, frankly, between you and me, simply isn't the done thing–_on St. Marcus Day. How pleasant, they'd come for the festivities. I wasn't amused. I'd like to have a celebration named after myself, something along the lines of your Mardi Gras. _Yes._ St. Caius the Gayest Day perhaps.

I donned my raspy vestments nonetheless.

I wasn't disappointed.

I still had a healthy _regard_ for Carlisle, but his son Edward was just the cherry to this _topper's_ pie.

Esme and Emmett were nonentities as far as I was concerned.

Trying to entice them to a meet and greet, Aro failed miserably. The least I could do was offer my meat to eat.

Coolly, Edward had glowered at me with those alien bullion eyes they all sported.

_Lovely, a tough nut to crack._

The most scintillating moment came when Aro couldn't keep his hands off the boy. He had Jane immobilize the young god with her shockwaves of pain until Edward foamed at the mouth.

My bedtime gamboler, Alec, shut down the nerves of his family.

We filled the castle's coliseum and observed with rapt, rapturous, raptor-like attention.

Aro nodded. Jane ceased her vehement violence. Aro took Edward's hand.

What they shared in that moment was everything either of them had ever thought as well as the remembrances and actions of every person they'd either touched or heard.

A sparkling dome encased them as their minds melted together. Tension tautened; lightning flashed and shattered the tiled floor. Their energy was otherworldy and exponential!

I still found it hard to believe Aro was straight by the way he keenly held Edward in place.

Who wouldn't want to fuck that bright, bronzed young thing?

They clashed apart to opposite ends–Edward knew of Didyme, the cover-up.

Aro understood Edward's capacity at knowledge surpassed his own.

Aro wanted Edward.

_Hell, I wanted Edward._ The one redeeming quality of these unsightly gowns was that my erection went unseen.

Stationary, stalking with their apposite orbs alone, the two had towered against the walls of the chamber. Alec released the other Cullens. Voices and murmurs eclipsed the cataclysm. Heidi opened the doors to a troupe of tasty morsels and attention turned to them, in diversion.

Saved by the dinner bell, Edward and his clan swept out with a final word from the arousing, arrogant young vampire, "Now, now, Aro. It won't do to kill or kidnap your guests of honor." In an undertone the brazen boy insulted, _"Arsehole."_

Like a slithering king cobra, Aro recoiled, "Stregoni, you must teach the insolent young man proper etiquette when addressing his elders."

You have no idea how delighted I was to learn we shared a common derogatory sobriquet for my half-brother. But, would you believe the bold, beautiful beast had referred to _me_ as Cuntus? I began to doubt his prescience, for I had no love of that womanly part.

Not many more years passed, and it always the same; Aro bewailing the loss of Edward.

Silently, I joined him in his frustration.

With Aro at the helm and us, his warriors, in rank order, a battalion of vampires for the henchman, we soldiered silently, dealing punitive justice. Gray and black and red, we reigned supreme.

There was new excitement, the frisson of peril, to our fruitless lives of fucking and feasting. Nothing was more opulent and far-reaching than our march across Europe, Asia, Russia, and Africa, sniffing out those that dared trespass Volturi Law.

Even I rejoiced Aro on the warpath.

None could stop us in our sweep to tame the unruly masses with our own brand of order, Solomon's Seal. Eleazer searched, His Highness called to arms, Chelsea unlocked the bonds of fraternity, Jane imprisoned with physical pain through one look, Alec took away all feeling, and we either made them ours or killed them outright.

I harnessed more and more divinities to my bed.

All the while, a niggling dormant fear beheld Aro. Edward knew everything.

In a bold, errant play, Aro sent Chelsea to the British Isles for Carlisle's son. He wanted the boy who held his cipher. He wanted the vampire whose mind-reading ability exceeded his own.

The iniquitous scientist wanted to frolic with Edward at his side.

Mad as a hatter, he'd bring his own destruction at this rate, leaving the leavened path to the crown open to me.

_What, dear friends, you though I was just in this for the ride?_

His emotions embroiled, Edward trod like a prisoner on a chain gang back into our castle. I grinned like a Cheshire cat and wound a silvery lock around my finger. Surveying the latest asset to our erupting soldiers, I hoped Edward would be my next conquest.

Once Aro was through with him.

I hoped he didn't break the boy's spirit too much.

Edward looked like fun, and smelled of sex.

A bleat halted the bleeding. _Carlisle, you sweet thing._

I sat higher on my cathedra and watched the opera as it dramatized.

_Lovely._

Seeing no way around his bond with Carlisle, accepting the offer of his poison, Aro unleashed Edward and readied his own phlebotomist's accoutrements.

I pouted that the tall, broad-shouldered vampire was to get away again.

After they'd left, Carlisle limping and Edward shouldering him up, Aro incised me, "You should keep tighter rein on your flaming indecencies, _brother._"

Incendiary, I'd internally cursed him, "_Whatever, Arse-fuck, there's no way in hell you weren't checking out his posterior too._"

Well, _my delicious desserts_, circumstances descended from that meeting.

Alice resurfaced, like a bad penny we wanted in our coffers.

The Cullens were resurgent.

And Alice had made her way to them.

Imagine one who could finagle everyone's thoughts combined with _un_ _vampiro femminile_ capable of fortune telling.

And what if they managed to snag a shield?

The trio would be explosive.

Holed up in some shit hole or other–_not the kind I liked, mind you_–the Cullens had multiplied. We'd heard from Alice's handler, J. Jenks.

Oh how they'd grown. Not in a fruitful way; you know we'd made nice smoking pyres of _quei pericolosa_, the aberrant immortal children**… **and there'd be no more, we'd made sure of that.

We knew of the Cullens' whereabouts, vaguely. We'd sent flamboyant Victoria and Laurent, nomad trackers, and they'd never returned. J. Jenks' obituary ran in the _Chicago Tribune_ a month ago.

They seemed to add on to their family like rabbits.

Edward and Alice were still diamond-bright rare-bits.

Someone had mentioned a Texan named Jazz. He, in particular, interested me. _What's that you say? Yes, Longhorn, that's what I've heard too._ A cowboy with bisexual tendencies and history in the Civil War? Truth be told, I was more interested in meeting him than the mortuary twinned minds of Alice and Eddie.

All the while, we watched, waited, baited.

Needing to cement our place as royalty, with an excuse to plant our heels in the spines of this burgeoning fold, we replenished our armament and reinforced our firmament.

We couldn't see the future; no, not yet, not without Alice. But we could certainly make it, bend it to our will.

Our search narrowed like helix. We were honing in on the Southeastern seaboard of the United States.

A massacre was coming.

If I could tell the future, like blighted Alice, it would go something like this–you must pay attention now, _pubblico piacevole_, because this is the crux.

The hot North American summer sun saturates over drifts of dune-like sand, as pristine as my skin millennia ago. Crimson banners waft in and out of the near-hellish breeze, and shadows make ochre streaks in the wide, silk ribbons flittering behind us. The dread-death march of our cloaked army steals with soft feet and hard deeds.

White to alizarin to grey to black. Silk to reeds to an unending dome of midday and blinding rays.

Hulking shapes form, spiny like branches of pine.

This smell is not of the forest, but salty like the sea.

A line gathers and multiplies, like those jeerers at Christ's crucifixion.

A sandstone abbey gleams with flecks of flint, echoing our shimmering flesh.

_What will happen now?_ _Dear little ones_, only time will tell how many will die.

If I had the gift of precognition I'd say Aro would speak thus:

"_Come to me. For I am the Apocalypse."_

You might think I'm being over-dramatic; however, I'm not. _For a change_.

Lay you down to sleep with these words of my own:

We're going to make–_what's that intestinal delight you sweetlings enjoy? _–yes, _mincemeat_ of the Cullens. All of them, and that includes Rose and Jazz–_those are their diminutives, si?_

Hark, is there another?

Only time will tell us.

* * *

~What can I tell you? Caius is a naughty boy. Review?~

The next outtake will be Bubba, written by my dear friend and fuckawesome wordsmith, winterstale.

_Dead Confederates_ next week (oh, it's gonna' be good, babies).

My o/s _Jealousy _was recced recently on The Fictionators – many thanks to windycitywonder!

The inaugural round of the Giggle Snort Awards is open for noms until May 12th. Eddie thinks he's dead fuckin' funny, and let's just not even talk about Bubba.

Gigglesnortawards(DOT)mmmboptastic(DOT)


	9. Vera and Me

Very many thanks to Viola Cornuta and winterstale for whipping this sweet, saucy, yet deep, outtake up on a whim!

To the ever helpful and beautiful AngryBadgerGirl, thanks for taking time out of your special day to beta this…much love!

Disclaimer: I know for a fact that Viola and winterstale own a slew of Vera Bradley items and love to torment me about the paisley-colored pukey totes ;). None of us owns SM's Twilight.

~~A happy Mother's Day to all you the moms out there!~~

* * *

**Vera and Me  
One day in May, Mt. Pleasant, SC  
M'Esme  
**

Well, now, I think they're just the cutest things ever.

There's a style and size for ev'body, and they never do wear out. Warshable too, if you remember to take the fabric-wrapped base outta the flat-bottomed bags. They air dry so pretty, dancin' on the line or on all the doorknobs of the house, dependin' on the weather. If your warsher pitches a fit on y'all, like mine's been doin', just haul 'em out and swish 'em gently around in the tub. Don't forgit to rinse real well, maybe add just a drop of white vinegar to the water for soft'nin. Just use your own judgment. You can call me if you have any questions.

This year, on Mother's Day, I'm plannin' to indulge myself. Instead of expectin' gifts—which of course I'll get, or those boys'll know the reason why they're crying—I've decided to order presents for all m'girls on Sunday afternoon. After all, it's not their fault they cain't or won't be mothers, that's just the way the Lord planned it. Yes, I said the _Lord,_ Eddie, so don't you start with me. You cain't sit there all fine and fancy, now you've finally gotten your willie wet with the right little woman, and tell me God didn't have a hand in your happiness. My boys think they get by me with their dimples and their eyerolls; I'll teach 'em how to roll... right out of my sight with their dirty laundry and their smeary surfaces. Jasper's Alice, bless her heart but that child ain't quite right, keeps the single-wide tidy at least. But the other two boys, well, the state they live in just don't bear thinkin' about.

Lotta things these days don't bear thinkin', so rather than get wound up over it, I've been borrowin' a page from li'l Alice's book. In my case, of course, I pay for my purchases, but my storage shed is an Aladdin's Cave of dry goods, and baubles, and gee-gaws. I tend to run to a bit of a hunter-gatherer in times of uncertainty. I cain't have girlfriends and lunch dates and the company of another woman my own age. So I gather things to me, trinkets and shiny little treasures, paper products, and cleanin' solutions. I reckon it's all just a way of showing I was here. Besides, gives me a sense of purpose and order in the universe to walk out there and take inventory.

In any event, I'm gonna celebrate family on Mother's Day by arranging a special Spring-time treat for all my best girls. I don' care if Eddie does call them _Vera Barfley bags_, I plan to enjoy ev'ry minute of my online shoppin' trip. Each of us copes in our own immortal way; don't think I haven't known what's what. So this little gift givin' extravaganza ain't gonna be spoilt by Eddie's nose in the air, Alice's cryptic quips or Junior's—or are they _Carl's?_—porn pop-ups. I'm goin' to have to get me a new password for this machine. When I go on the computer-net and find it cluttered with the wrong style of salacious material, it just aggravates the livin' daylights outta me.

I don't really have anything particular from Vera I'm wanting for myself at the present. I do pick up every piece from my favorite patterns as they come out each January and July. With this spring's togetherness and fallin' in—with your intended love, and your intended family—I've been most drawn to _Sittin' in a Tree. _

Now, I try to make my lists alphabetically, so's I don't forget anyone.

_Alice._ That child does tend to the darker end of the palate, and frankly, my Color Me Beautiful book says her black tresses an' porcelain skin would do real well with some bold color. However, I ain't one to question another lady's _couture_, so I reckon I'll choose this here _Night an' Day_ pattern. 'Course little thing does require a larger bag for all of her acquisitions—Lord, don't she come home ev'ry time from runnin' to town with a purseful! And so green-minded of her to carry her own bag instead of takin' a sack from ev'ry retailer she frequents. Bless her heart, does she really think we don't know about her five-finger discountin'? Being a mother-in-law (which I am, for all intents and purposes), has it's amusin' moments. Little one thinks she's so sneaky.

_Bella._ That one runs to the practical. I do think she could do with a fair bit of whimsy to lighten her load a mite. She's Eddie's mate for good and all, as she should be, but it sure won't be a simple trip to the islands of the blessed. I'm proud to have another offspring, but the messy birthin' of one of our kind...well, that's for another day. Now, this here _Yellow Bird _looks like just the thing. Black background, to hide all them stains that might occur between runnin' with Eddie and stashin' her purse behind the counter over at Mama's. Plus, it's got them festive yellow pheasants all over! Eddie just loves his little gal in yellow, and those fancy birds call to mind her hobby. Now, somethin' roomy, with plenty of pockets fer carrying her little pet bunny.

_Mama Brown_. Th' varry salt of the Earth, that blessed lady, an' not to mention she keeps my boys in line when I cain't keep my eyes on them, which ain't a task fer the faint of heart. Why, this here _Get Carried Away_ tote in Paprika looks like just the thing. That shade of tangerine'll vibrate to her Sacral Chakra for plenty of protection, an' complement that pretty _café au lait_ skin of hers right nice.

_Rose._ Such a sweet flower inside all them thorns. She has whipped my Bubba into shape which weren't no small task, both literal and figgerative, so she calls for something special. Does my heart good to see those two steppin' into the roles they were meant for. I'm not sorry to say I was plum fretful over Bubba for many a decade. He may have tried to hide it with all his foolishness, but I've seen him graspin' for the meaning of his presence in this family. Poor sensitive soul: readin' all of them books, tryin' to learn about standin' as a man and all's he had to do was find our ramblin' Rose. I see this here _Vintage Rose_ pattern, and I think it might be jus' the thing. Now that Vivian bag has plenty of room and won't that handle just fit nice over Bubba's big ol' forearm when he carries her bag for her?

After all this, some of you may be wondering what I myself am wishin' for this Mother's Day, once I've spread my love t' my lovelies. Truly, all I want from my boys is flowers. So I'll accept my hangin' baskets and my pots, set them where they best belong, and shoo the boys back off to Luxury Hollows with my thanks in their ears. I'm sure they prefer it to my boxin' them ears. When they tease me about my love for growin' things, I do get a mite defensive. That's the one little bit of this eternal life that never treats me poorly: gardening. Where I live, while I live, I plant. Makes it easier to keep my patented Down-Home M'Esme happy face on.

Since Alice and Rose come to join up with Jasper and Emmett, and precious Bella's made Eddie smile so wide—even though he still tries to hide it from me—I've never felt more whole, and I've never been sadder. My family's complete, but it cain't last. From what li'l Alice says, livin' here together might not be what the Cullens'll be doin' for much longer. I know my husband's heart and mind, and he's plumb frantic underneath the cigar chewin' and the snack sniffin'. So for now, I'm gonna give gifts and plant flowers and keep my thoughts to myself, even from Eddie. It'll be easier to whale on some fine Italian ass when no one expects it of me.

No, what this mama _needs_ on Mother's Day is private time with my man! Just the right distraction. There are two ways I like him best these days. One is full of po'try readin' and seduction, when he lulls my heart along with my body. Last night, I'd called him _wicked—_which got me some mighty pretty results—when he recited this passage from Yeats:

"_A young man in the dark am I, _

_But a wild old man in the light,  
That can make a cat laugh, or  
Can touch by mother wit  
Things hid in their marrow-bones  
From time long passed away,  
Hid from all those warty lads  
That by their bodies lay.'  
Daybreak and a candle-end. _

_'All men live in suffering,  
I know as few can know,  
Whether they take the upper road  
Or stay content on the low,  
Rower bent in his row-boat  
Or weaver bent at his loom,  
Horseman erect upon horseback  
Or child hid in the womb.'  
Daybreak and a candle-end. _

_'That some stream of lightning  
From the old man in the skies  
Can burn out that suffering  
No right-taught man denies.  
But a coarse old man am I,  
I choose the second-best,  
I forget it all awhile  
Upon a woman's breast.'  
Daybreak and a candle-end."_

Now this weekend, instead of my educated gentleman and his thoughtful reflection on the end of days, I want my demon lover, so I'm anglin' for a big box from GoodVibes in a plain brown wrapper, with a Vibratin' Positionin' Pillow and a Sport Sheet inside. Believe you me, I'm real familiar with that store. Because Eddie forgot his rearin' and took it upon himself to pinch Bella's most personal toys, I had to do what good mothers always do. I cleaned up that insecure git's—I mean _that durned fool's—_mess. Sent his girl a nice assortment of replacements from the best store around. Because I love him (almost as much as I purely long to strangle him) I ordered Eddie a selection of masturbation sleeves so's he can pick a favorite, and a double batch o' their Gun Oil lubricant. I call it my 'first aid kit' and have set it aside with my emergency supply of paper products, in case Bella gets out of his reach for a spell.

I've been leavin' the GoodVibes homepage open on my laptop for my dear and glorious physician-turned-DVM, my _Beast_ Cullen, to find when he walks by. With those sweet additions to our personal playground, also known as the _Master _bedroom, we can fire up more'n one kind of rabbit, both of 'em smokin', if you catch my drift.

Thank goodness most of our private universe is transportable—we've been all over the world, pickin' up kin like strays, all along the way. Now last time, _shoowee_, I cain't hardly catch my breath for thinking on how Carl—_Carlisle, he was then_—was equally a man of salt and earth in fair England. Somethin' about returning to his mother country sure did make Carl want to plow my fields. Lordamighty, that man went from active for his age to downright insatiable once that mist off the moors got into his skin.

Why, I remember this one time, we'd happened upon a couple of Fallow deer and chased 'em right through the hedgerows at Ted Hughes' estate. Ooh, that old so-and-so just fries my venom, leavin' that poor little Sylvia all alone with those little ones. I was just so wound up I was ready to spit rusty nails and, don't you know, Carl started getting frisky. When my man is on the hunt he can be one determined creature. I do recall the fields had just been turned up for spring and that heavy chalk soil felt just as soft and fluffy as could be.

_I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up  
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth's mouth,  
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle  
With the habit of the dogged grave…_

You know Carl had a little feast of me right there in th' middle of that field. With a tongue that talented an' ways more wicked than refined, you know I made my fair share of whining and moanin'! No sir, that weren't no owl screeching on th' moor that caused you to shake out your _portieres_ and draw 'em together as you muttered about nocturnal brutes.

_And I,  
_

_Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting  
Morsel in the earth's mouth, strain to the master-  
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.  
That maybe in his own time meets the weather  
_

_Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside-down,  
Falls from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,  
The horizon trap him; _

I do find it particular sad that there are no graves for us, as we used to be. Nor shall there be if the worst comes to pass. Why with our tastes and endless days and nights watching the march of time, we know more of death than any human. And yet, we are dust, borne into the winds, scattered about the Earth.

…_the round angelic eye  
Smashed, mix his heart's blood with the mire of the land._

No laurel. No remembrance.

_...for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return._

He's a good man, my Carl. They're _all_ good men; a mama couldn't be more proud. Their womenfolk: all fine, strong girls and real partners, jus' as true and decent as their mates.

_They've only just found each other. They deserve time to tell their own stories, just like me and Carl…_

Well! Gracious! All of this ruminatin' ain't done nothin' but gotten me mighty distracted from my task at hand. If'n I don't put my Vera Bradley orders in correctly, that cute UPS man will just about bust trying to get all this out by second day air_._ I hate to be extravagant an' pay extra for overnight delivery. But I will if need be. Because I can.

Because I'm Esme Cullen, and I take care of my own.

* * *

~Well, damn, M'Esme just gave me the chills~

_The Wild Old Wicked Man - _W.B. Yeats

_The Hawk in the Rain_ – Ted Hughes

_English_ _Burial Service_, adapted from Genesis 3:16

All my love to Viola Cornuta and winterstale for their fascinating look at Esme! You should take a gander at their own writing and other collaborations.

Cheers, Rie~


	10. The Hard Bard

Sloppies to Viola Cornuta for getting this all in order on such short notice—the woman, she owns me.

Disclaimer: Fuck it, I'm sure The Edward writes poetry too…_whatever._

Much love (licks, strokes, grabs, whatever you want, really) to my DW babes and Eddie's FB broads! Couldn't do this without y'all, and I gotta' say, we're having the most fuckin' fun because of you! Extra slaps, smirks, kisses to Derrydown Green and MsEm for takin' Eddie in hand, making artwork, and generally, letting him fuck around with y'all.

~~So, Eddie wanted to get all poetic and shit. Here's a trio of po*ah*ems~~

* * *

**The Hard Bard**

_**~Ode to Pussy~**_

A pussy does not have 'walls',

A pussy doesn't grip or clench my dick like it's a baseball bat.

_Though with my dimensions, you my just be allowed to think that._

No pussy has ever 'milked my cock', y'all,

More like it flutters and pulses and squeezes my tip, that throbbing-soft-hard mushroom hat.

_~l~_

It don't seep, or _ooze_ like a goddamn gash,

Or leak like bad plumbing.

Soft, sleek, slick, a nice pussy makes my mind hash,

And ain't nuthin' better'n a little clitoral thumbing.

_~l~_

Each one is shapely, distinct and cunning,

I've studied them all, with my sight, my tongue, my fingers, my mouth…humming.

Running up your labia, both delicate and bold,

Some swollen, some fair, some tiny…each pussy is gold.

_~l~_

A clit, not your 'core', maybe your nubbin',

Plays hide n' seek amongst flesh, askin' for a tender rubbin'.

Out of its caul, it brightens and trembles,

Pinpoint and perfect and pink and…_mmmmm_, the vision makes me mumble.

_~l~_

You're always covered up, sweet, sweet pussy.

I'd like to see more of you, plump and juicy.

Secreted away

In lace that's crotchless

_Big fan, by the way,_

Or hidden by 'apple-baggers', boy-cut or cheekies,

G-string, thong, commando, cut-out peekie,

You delight and excite

You arouse, _you incite._

_~l~__  
_

On landscaping, I'm just a horny lover,

Certainly don't mind a fluffy cover.

Straight and silken,

Curly and wiltin',

Like a treasure hunt, it's all so fuckin' enticin'

The Jungle Queen look,

A landing strip,

Bare nekkid ladies,

Y'all got me by the hook.

_~l~_

Snatch, coochie, goulash, vajayjay,

I just like _pussy_ in plentiful ways.

My lips tingling,

My cheeks wet,

My mouth swollen from sucking and lickin'

Hey, if I had my druthers, I'd be in you all the goddamn day.

_~l~_

And when you climax, sweet, hot pussy,

You change from velveteen softness to ridged tightening,

The perfect channel holds me in a ruffled, liquid delta

All sides thrumming,

And cumming and cumming.

_~l~_

Of course, I gotta' admit,

I've tasted the gold standard, and _I've _been bit.

Bella's pussy is so pretty,

With pearly and pink,

Merely the thought,

Sends toxin straight to my dick.

A little chestnut nest,

A place to lap, to rest,

Ladies, I just have to confess,

Bella's Pussy Is The Best.

Oh yeah, and I like tits, too.

**_~ll~_**

_**~Tits, a Homily~**_

How do I love tits? Let me count the ways.

I love thy bosoms for their heft and weight,

Sitting all splendid and creamy, in my hands.

Just so holy, just so right.

_~l~_

Your rubbed and licked and tickled nipples,

Aroused to swollen flesh with silk and dimples,

Every stroke of my fingers, the flat of my palm,

A tight pinch of my fingertips…

I lower my eyelashes and feel your ragged breath,

Follow the circumference with my hand,

Your womanly curves are wetdreams,

Everything about you gets to my glans.

_~l~_

From the ends of your long Chesapeake hair,

Your buds peek in and out,

They smile, they simper, they ask me near.

I lick, you smile; I suck, you cry and ache,

I want you, I'll have you, I take…

In this, your curvaceous beauty, I sup from your Grace.

_~l~_

Scantily clad and dressed in white,

The sun shafts through and picks up your passionate plight.

Lace tucks like a lover about your fuckin' fine crests.

It niggles me, makes me hard, makes me _pine_ to suckle you best.

In moonlight, on the back forty,

Under rays, reclining on mah porch and kinda' horny,

Amidst candles and atop my chenille bedspread,

Your pillowy tits find an arc, and the fathomless color red.

_~l~_

I love your breasts freely, as men might crusade for Right,

I sink against you as your tits clasp my cock tight.

I love you purely, like a man to his mate,

And every fuckin' night I slip and slide and suck,

And sing your praise…in your plush groove,

My dick sinks and…and gives up its fight.

_~l~_

I goddamn love you with eroticism put to good use,

Your pretty, pear-drop breasts I'd never abuse.

In my old griefs, an innocent chap, I walked alone, and had no mishap.

But now, with you, I'm given free rein,

Of your body, your heart, your flesh,

I'm _untamed._

_~l~__  
_

Beautiful tits, I love thee with an enormous feeling (y'all know what I'm referring to),

So _big,_ I seem to lose.

Lost saints, old _haints_, hot breaths,

Fuck you hard, and soft and slippery…

No more, no less, velvety…_grooves_.

_~l~_

Smiles, tears, tits, peaches and pears.

Not to hold you, stroke you, touch you is completely fuckin' not to bear.

And, if Lucifer choose,

I might even trade mah PBR booze.

Because your tits, my Bella,

Rival life, implode death.

Your breasts, Bella,

Order me,

And I'm at your behest.

**Sonnets from the Protuguese**

**by Elizabeth Barrett Browning**

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.  
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height  
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight  
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.  
I love thee to the level of everyday's  
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.  
I love thee freely, as men might strive for Right;  
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.  
I love thee with the passion put to use  
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.  
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose  
With my lost saints,–I love thee with the breath,  
Smiles, tears, of all my life!–and, if God choose,  
I shall but love thee better after death.

Eddie: Okay, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's rolling over in her grave, but what the fuck? I'm a dead man just goin' for a roll in the hay ;).

_**~~ll~~**_

_**~Asses to Asses~**_

Asses to Asses

And Dust to Dust

Bella's bottom is just so goddamn lush.

_~l~_

Curvy and firm

But jiggly and peachy

Just thinkin' about it

Makes me hard, greedy, reachy.

_~l~_

The dimples on top

Cause me to lick my lips

The cleft between

Beckons my fingers to that soft clamp, her swelterin' puss, her hips.

_~l~_

Dust I am

And unto Dust I'll return

But not fuckin' before

I put my cock in that place for which I yearn.

_~l~_

My face below

My fingers slipping inside

She gets so wet

We slip, we slide.

_~l~_

I will make you, Bella

Bed you, take you.

I would die for you, Bella

Save you from the Volturi

_Anything_ to save you.

_~l~_

I will bring thee to ashes

Upon the earth

I will give you lashes

Of my strength, my girth.

_~l~_

In the sight of all them

That behold thee

I will kneel

I will fuck

I will love

I will

End.

_~l~_

Asses to Asses

Ashes to Ashes

Lust to Lust

Dust to Dust.

**_Genesis 3:19_**

**_Ezekial 28:18_**

_

* * *

_

~Eddie was really cute, sweet, lovely, and anxious writing these, y'all, so show him some love~

Dead Confederates next week—it's the first anniversary edition (I know! That's fuckin' crazy!). Eddie and I are working really hard to make it just completely unreal. Thank you for your patience.

Cheers,

Rie~


	11. Just Bubba's Luck

Super sassy love and adoration for the beta fuckin' awesome duo, Vanessarae and Viola Cornuta!

Disclaimer: Bubba, oh Bubba! Damn straight he's mine. And this guy right here is winterstale's too.

~~This is just beyond brilliant. Y'all will be smiling, trust. A plateful of Bubba by my dear friend, fanfucktabulous writer, and the premier Emmett aficionado~~

* * *

**Just Bubba's Luck**

I might'a married that girl if her daddy hadn't tried to shoot me.

Now, I know I'm not the suave, foreign one, the one with the fancy Oak Park history or some damn warrior, but one thing a McCarty would never do is walk right in on Sunday lunch with a .12-gauge callin' for a wedding or a hangin', and if we did, we sure as hell wouldn't take along two half-dense brothers who had fourteen teeth between 'em as back-up. Some things just were not done. My granny would worn our asses out if _we _tried such fool-headedness.

Thanks to the quick thinking and crack aim of my brother Elbert, Herman Sanders' shot went all to hell as soon as that biscuit hit him smack in the left eye.

Lucky for me, that was his good eye.

Lucky for me, too, Abel Greer was driving the Slow and Easy, also known as the Knoxville, Sevierville and Eastern Railroad, _towards _Knoxville. I'd hopped on that old train more than on ol' round-heeled Becky Sanders, anyway. Hell, me and Elbert would ride those rails up to Knoxville every Saturday evenin'. Becky had rode me twice; I do believe that was once on a Tuesday afternoon and then that very same Sunday morning when we shoulda been in church.

Preacher was probably talkin' on eternal damnation in the lake of everlastin' fire, just like he always did on the third Sunday of the month. I'd heard that sermon once every few weeks since I was old enough to go to Sunday meeting. On the other hand, I'd only had Becky the one time. I figured I knew the sermon backwards and forwards; I'd seen Becky forwards and was mighty interested in tryin' her out backwards for a change of scenery.

Lucky for me that was the last time. That girl would have sucked the stripes off a barber's pole if you'd give her half a chance. If I'd let her near me one more time I bet I would've gone around cock-eyed and with a limp for the rest of my days.

So, in the interest of carryin' on the McCarty name with the _right girl_ and keepin' my pecker in one piece, I took off. I figured I'd lie low up in Knoxville for a week or so, just long enough for some other sorry jackass to let ol' Becky have a ride. Then I'd run on home.

Problem was, I'd lit out of Granny's kitchen hotter than a goat's ass in a pepper patch and din't have one thin dime to my name. I could do without when it came to woman-folk but damned if I'd run around hungry for a week.

If there's one hobby I've carried with me all of my ninety-five years walkin' this Earth, no matter if it's livin or existin', it's the fairer sex. I just… well, I can't help myself for appreciatin' on the female form. The way ladies look and feel and sound and damn, that smell of 'em… it don't matter to me if they're a handful or an armful. Each one of 'em has their own mysteries and special little particulars. How could a man not want to get a little sample of ever'one he can?

Lucky for me, all McCartys had the gift of gab and a talent with games. My talents with the women-folk was just gravy.

By Sunday evenin' I was down in Mechanicsville, asleep in the warm arms of a red-head whose husband had gone North for work, had a dollar in my pocket I'd won at dice down behind the Bijou theatre on Gay Street, and an invitation to Cass Walker's backroom poker game on Monday night.

I liked to keep busy. McCartys didn't set much by those who couldn't find some industry to occupy themselves. Idle hands an' all.

I hated I never made that poker game up at Walker's store. Sorta had to scoot out of Knoxville _right quick_. That red-head's husband came staggerin' in, drunk and out of work again, from what I heard tell… or yelled. I waited out some of that fussin', but you would've thought they was trying to skin cats there was so much dang screechin' and things breakin'. I took my chance_, and her man's jacket since it was looking like I'd be sleeping rough that night_, and headed on out the bedroom window. Well, wouldn't you know that old boy come on out front to wish me well with a couple of bad shots whizzin' right by my ears. I took off for the train yard a few streets over and managed to lose him and the law when I hopped another quick ride out of town. Lucky for me that red-head's husband's coat had fifty dollars in the pocket and a pint of real Canada whisky, 'cause when I woke up in another boxcar and realized I was hungover in Chicago, it was damn cold.

I'd never been further North than Knoxville, and there I was up in the Windy City, eatin' fancy Italian macaroni and makin' time with the little black-headed girl who brung out the food. She had my drawers around my boots slicker than cat shit on a hot skillet in that back room. She did such things to this country boy, I never heard them Tommy guns goin' off! Them boys was the first _Eye-__talians_ I ever came across, but _certainly not the last_, and they was about the worst shots I'd ever seen. That macaroni house looked like it'd been sprayed down in tomato gravy, and there was still folks sittin' at their little tables, lookin' like they'd just seen the ghost of Cootie Brown.

Fortunately, I spotted a nice wool cap on the floor. I asked around, but no one said it was their'n. I sure did need that cap once I woke up in Minneapolis. Them railcars was gettin' more and more chilly, not to mention cows ain't the cleanest of bedfellows. It was Thursday, and I figured I needed to be makin' my way home soon. But I sure as shit weren't headin back on home stinkin' like the inside of a cow-filled boxcar.

Bein' wise in the ways of the city-Minneapolis was just a bigger Knoxville, after all-I knew to head toward the nearest pawn shop. Where there's a pawnshop, there's a boardin' house, affordable for a man with light pockets and ridin' a heavy run of good fortune . If'n I had to, I'd pawn my overcoat until I could work a table of cards. Blue eyes and dimples went a long way toward gettin' me a bath and a shave. I paid my 'water bill' right well and, _lucky for me_, someone run off with that ol' jacket I'd had since Knoxville and left a big heavy woolen coat with an honest-to-God second-class train ticket to Anchorage, Alaska, in the pocket.

Wouldn't you know that yeller-headed lady at the train station who changed my ticket to 3rd class had some spare room in her little office for a cot. When she closed up of the evenin', we had us some place to get friendly, and I had an extra ten dollars from turnin' second-class to third.

When I got to Anchorage, Alaska, I figured I was about the luckiest shit-kickin' country boy in the whole entire history of Sevier County. I did need some money to get back home, but I sure was glad I got to see the last frontier. A pretty little Inuit lady taught me all about her Northwest Passage and then directed me on the right way out of town, even though we did have some difficulties conversin'. I got the jist of what she meant and started to make my way to a logging camp to ask for work. I sure was lucky I stuck to the snow and grass on the side of the road 'cause them trucks with the logging company name writ on their sides was haulin' ass down that muddy road.

I never did make it up to that lumber company in Talkeenta. I did, however, run across the biggest damn grizzly bear I do believe man has ever encountered. That fucker was taller than me when on its hind legs and was hell-bent on battin' me around like it was a cat with a ball of yarn. I'd seen my share of black bears in the Smokies, but this was a huge 1500-pound, predatory, fuckin' _machine_.

I damn near broke the leg the Grizzly hadn't mauled tryin' to crawl after that _lucky_ cap I'd picked up in Chicago.

Lucky for me Carlisle was out huntin' and heard the bear's roar, 'cause it weren't me screamin like a banshee Indian, that's for damn sure. He swooped down, lookin' like St. Peter himself and said something to me about _eternal life without death_. I told him I didn't much care what he said or did as long as he'd find me a couple of aspirin tablets and a warm place to sleep.

It sure had been a hell of a week and a half.

'Course I had no idea I was about to be fried up like a side of bacon in my own blood and sinew, changed from man to inhuman. Bitch of it was, I was the first McCarty to cross the Mason–Dixon line and, with no job to speak of, I hadn't even had a cent to send my mama a telegram about it all. That might have been a spot of luck, though. Mama could carry a grudge when it came to actin' up at Sunday lunch.

Carlisle introduced me to his family: Esme and Edward. He said they could be my family, too.

I just about couldn't believe the run of good fortune I was havin'!

There I was, suddenly reborn and then seein' the whole entire world with a family of untirin' travellin' folk. I sure did wish I could tell my Mama about it all, 'cause I was happier than a newborn tick on a fat hound. We went on a Grand Tour of Europe, the four of us. Met some more of our kind, most unsettlin' bunch imaginable, worse'n revenoors. Settled down in England, and the Cullens-the name we all shared now-did real well there, until ol' Eddie had a serious bad streak with a woman called Chelsea.

I'd settled real good into the lifestyle when we finally made it to England. It was just the four of us still, 'cause Jazz was dippin' his pole and havin' his fill on his own time. That's where I took up my appreciation of fine literature. Barbara Cartland: now that lady sure can tell a story. All them books about little perky-tittied orphan country lasses and their manly London guardians just captured my imagination. Those tiny backwater gals always did just peachy-keen amongst those fine London people, and there weren't a reason I couldn't do the same. Besides, somethin' about love and togetherness and the bonds of friend and family winnin' out in the end just lumped up my throat ever' time. No matter what, I've always got my people and a big ol' grin. When it seems like I might be forgettin' that and fixin' to get all down in the mouth about what's to come, I just take me another novel out and get to readin'.

As interestin' as it was traveling and seeing everything and ever'one across the big pond, I can't say I see much to recommend about _some parts_ of Europe.

I don't care to talk on that much but… well, let's just say sometimes _seein' hard things can turn a man hard_. The more time you spend lookin over your shoulder, waitin' for some damn real-live carnival freak-show to turn up and end one of your own, a man kindly starts to feelin' less than fuckin' gracious.

I spent my time in England watching and waiting. At first, I wouldn't leave Eddie alone for worry one of them black-robed folks might come for him anyway. Then he reared up at me, mad as wet hen, and told me if I didn't take my head out of his ass, he was gonna' introduce me to my own personal Jesus. And my cock would be nothin' more than an icon like them hippie-dippy wanderers in Glastonbury worshipped while they spliffed up before continuin' their pilgrimages to Stonehenge.

Eventually, we made our way to the Low Country and set up real fine down to Luxury Hollows. Hell, I even got to meet a real-live Confederate officer when Jazz joined up with us. I made sure not to mention _most of the folks in East Tennessee went Union_. Esme wouldn't have ugliness come up between her boys.

I had to run on up to Sevier County and look in on the McCartys once we got to Cainwhore. Tennessee was barely a two-hour sprint, and it was just too tempting to see what had become of the old homefolks.

_For some reason I couldn't make myself look around for Mama, though._

I did see that poor old Becky Sanders got so fat it took two dogs to bark at her an' lost most of them pretty teeth her Daddy was so proud of while she was at it.

_**~~ll~~**_

When it boilt down to it, I decided to let Eddie-or Edward depending on our locale-pull that tortured, navel-gazing, Byronic Hero shit. Hell, long-faced boy was just the wing-man my jovial ass needed. Everywhere we roamed I was meetin' folk just like us, and dangamighty if undead women didn't turn out to be damn pretty _and_ pretty damn willing.

I met all sorts of ladies on our travels. Mary and Mekenna, Zafrina and Senna. I had me a wee little Irish lassie I'd call on, Maggie, and her _big _sister Siobhan with all them dangerous curves. _I never complain when I've got more cushion for my pushin'!_

I have to say my favorite place to visit was Denali, the site of that lucky day when Carlisle found me. Eddie and I would make it up there every year or so, enjoy some local fare, and I'd hit the Klondike Trifecta: Irina_, when she was home_, Miss Katie, and Hell-cat Tanya. Sometimes I'd even hit it all at once. Them were some fine days.

_~~ll~~_

Lucky for me I've paid attention all these years. Women are _simple creatures_ when it came right down to it…with beautiful, complicated bodies I'd spent more than my fair share of time studyin'.

These pearls of wisdom, these gentle drops of rain should fuckin' be published or posted in the men's bathroom of every Applebee's nationwide or some shit. I'd win a Nobel Prize for Literature for these jewels, maybe even some damned humanitarian award for the aidin' and assistin' of all the damn introspective _wankers_-like my suddenly ever-spankin' little brother-just fuckin' gettin' some. It damn near broke my stony-dead heart watchin' Eddie go off the pony. My own baby braw, the hardest of the stony and stoned undead, ceptin' me–_of course_–was hell-bent on rubbin' freakin' callouses on his one-eyed wonder worm as soon as Bella took one look at him and turned him to stone.

Some poor fuckers have no luck at all.

We could have hung twenty layers of wallpaper with the amount of spooge that fucker jerked over the snack-sized brunette human from over t' Mama's. He was a bad-assed muthafucker, reduced to nothin' more than a chronic warrior against the purple-headed jizz spitter. Sad cow-eyed Eddie, unluckiest bastard I've ever met.

He wouldn't listen to me, and there the fool lay, rubbin his nub instead of neck deep in the nasty.

Any sumbitch with, or without, a pulse could pull a fair share of either variety poontang if he'd just follow my simple advice:

_**Bubba Cullen's Five Rules For Pullin' Good Cooter.**_

_1. When you come upon one you like the look of, act all shy and shit but make sure she cottons on you've got an interest in her. If she's too stupid to get the point of a coupla looks over your beer, shoulder, or the pool table, she's most likely inbred, insecure__,__ or lazy. All of them things mean a lay about as excitin' as dry humpin' Maw's Goose-Down Pillers, and you should move on. I'll add as one of them... er... cravats that insecure chicks can be a gold mine of pent-up dirty librarian fuck-me harder, fuck-me faster, and smack-my-ass types, but those ho__'__s__ (or hoes?)__ tend to cling like Georgia red clay and should only be handled by the skillful professional like me._

_2. Once you've got her attention, work that line a little. Ignore her. Even better, pay attention to her friend._ _If her friend's nasty-ass, it'll piss her off, and she'll start workin' for your attention. If her friend's fine as frog hair, too, you could get in there for a little triple-decker action, and that shit ain't never a bad thing._

_3. Sometimes, __the feisty ones__ get stubborn. These are the ones you gotta amuse to calm 'em down a bit. Lay your wantin' out there, get the hooker's attention and make her laugh. It don't hurt a bit at this stage to make an ass of y'self. Ain't_ _nothing to let your pride take a slobber-knocker when the ultimate prize is between them thighs. I like to say laughter is the best lube around._

_4. At this stage of affairs, it ain't improper to get a little physical. It lets her know you're reckonin' about her body and gives you a chance for a final perusal of the merchandise. I'm partial to a little slap on that ass m' own self. Those little squeals and giggles y'get from a well-placed pop on the posterior are like a concerto to my highly sensitive ears. Plus, it portends her tendencies for vocalizin'. I do love me a screamer. _

_5. A word about cockblockers. They are out there, like damn potholes in the road to your intended pussy. If it's a chick, go back to step 2 and repeat. It it's a dude, it's absolutely imperative to figure out which side of his bread is buttered. Women who tote around them Sex an' the City type, gay boyfriends are a recent development, and here's how I've learnt to handle the Fairy Fuck-busters. Let him know y'ain't got a care in the world about where he sticks his wick, an' if you got a buddy that'll take a mouth fuck from anywhere, no matter who's attached to the mouth, you're solid. Just make absolutely, posi-fuckin'-tively sure he understands your Hershey highway is exit-only. Unless you're into that shit, and if you are, ain't nothing but a thing, and refer yourself back to step 2. _

_Only a virtuoso of the tuna taco should come up agin' the boyfriend. Tell y'self this - if she's all satisfied with who's currently knockin' her boots, why the hell have you made it to step 5? That's right. There's a chink in the armor somewhere. There may be a little cock struttin', and if that's all it takes to send his ass to the showers, he were a pussy that didn't deserve her anyway. If it gets physical, and you're capable, like me, of wipin' the floor with someone's ass, no problem. Chicks totally dig that 'fair maiden-two knights battling for her hand' bullshit. Plus, you might get banged up a little if you're human, and she'll go all Florence Nightengale on your shit, which is your ticket into pussydise. You cain't show me a lady who don't love fawnin' and pettin' over a man who's been injured in a battle for her hand. Or snatch. Whatever._

_If the boyfriend manages to shift her attention away from you for a nano-second, walk the hell away and take your shit to greener pastures. Fuck the __broad__, she weren't nothin' but a piece of ass anyway._

_Just never, ever let it rattle your fuckin' cage.__ They's just girls. Wait five minutes and they'll be another one that'll come along right behind the first one. __I don't care how fine they look, how good they smell, or even how good __they__ is at gobblin' your gopher. __Ain't no need to get all down in the mouth about 'em._

_We Cullen boys is_ _hard motherfuckers, dawg._

_It's how we roll._

_~~ll~~_

Of course them rules don't amount to a hill of beans when you see _her_.

I can't rightly say who saw who first. The way Rose tells it, she scented us comin' over the bridge from Cainwhore, and I can't say I'd be surprised. My woman does tend to run a bit… edgy. _Who would blame her?_

Lucky for me that Garrett fucker was a stupid shit who would rather go off on some damn sentimental journey, visitin' battlefields for some lame ass reason . Holy shitcracker, Rose was a fine slice of undead woman, and that pontificatin' nomad couldn't stay in one place too long without gettin' sloppy on his feed and ignoring his woman. My Rosie ran his ass on out of here, and I guaran-damn-tee he won't get no closer to Cainwhore again than the Visitor's Center up at Cowpens Battlefield Park.

Rose told him she was no longer a stop on his Continental Army Magical Memory Tour.

_Hellfuckinyeah!_ I was in there.

Opportunity had turned it's shinin' face on me once again, and I had my chance with her. Now just to convince her to be forever-mine. After seventy year of cattin' around the world, I was lookin' for somethin' a bit more permanent, and I just couldn't imagine any other damned-to-hell walkin'-dead woman but Rose Hale by my side.

I had it bad. _I was fucked._

I even got me a new pair of Carharrts and asked Eddie to borry the F-250 he kept for his Sunday outtin's.

He coulda' been a just a gnat's ass more supportive.

"Why don't you just ride her around the back forty on your Kubota?" he'd snarled at me when I asked for the keys.

"This ain't just a piece of pussy-pie, Ed."

_Sumbitch damn near took my ear off flingin' them keys at me!_

"Don't get the seats dirty. An' don't rag out the engine again. An' don't clean your ears with the keys, Emma-lou."

I tore off from the double-wide 'fore that ever'whinging grope show had a chance to change his spunk-addled mind.

I was neat and clean, hangin' free, and my pecker was ripe fer pickin'.

_But still lucky? _

_~~ll~~_

_Dang._

I kicked up another cloud of gravel and dirty sand.

She'd said, real clear, I could get her at Mama's at 8:00. Maw Esme would be lookin' for us at 8:30, and she don't stand for tardiness. There it was 8:20, and I was still standin' there, leanin' against the truck like some dipshit holdin' some flowers, and just where the fuck was Rose? I said it at 8:05 and again at 8:15. If she wasn't there in five minutes, I was bookin' ass.

_Fuck her, _I told myself.

Yeah..._oh fuck her and those mile long legs and that pretty mouth_...

I dug the heel of my new Carhartts into the sandy earth, making an absent minded arc and grinnin' to myself like a doped-up monkey.

When I noticed I'd just drooled on my fresh shirt, I was worried my _good karma_ had finally ran out.

Just then, the door swung open, her scent wafted towards me and _Gaaawddammm_, there she was, like some country-fried angel all in the tiniest little white dress. Even from across the parking lot, I could make out the pinpoint white flowers embroidered into the material, all innocence and light. Her rippling, honeyed blonde hair just barely floated away from her face with each step she took toward me. Them golden eyes of hers were locked laser tight on mine, and I swear to Christ all time halted and all of my already heightened senses overflowed with her.

_Rose. _

She stopped just in front of me and looked up with that cocky-assed little grin of hers.

"Well, hello there, Bubba," her sun-dried grass and mint breath washed over me with that buttered-whiskey voice. She looked down at the flowers, raised an eyebrow.

"Flowers?"

I thrust the bouquet of sunflowers I'd picked up at The Pig right at her.

"Why thank you."

"They... uh... seemed more like you than some prissy-assed roses or somethin' like that." I sputtered like a damn human kid over at Wando High. _My luck was goin' fast._

Suddenly, I was as nervy as a dog shittin' peach pits.

"Why?"

"They just look more... real... and, they're bold and sturdy -"

"Sturdy?" she stopped me, pissed or amused–sometimes with Rose it was hard to tell the difference.

"Well, yeah... I mean... you're strong... sturdy. Not something that's goin' to fall over at the first gust of a wind or wilt in a little bit of heat."

"Oh," she smiled, looking down at them.

I offered her my arm to walk her to the passenger side of the truck. Without realizing it, my earlier angsty, Eddie-like heel dragging had created a ten inch furrow in the ground, and I stepped right into it, ending up splayed out like a dead lizard under the wheel of a semi right in front of her.

_Dangamightyfuckitalltohell._

Without a word, she caught me by the collar, jerked me clean up off the ground and dropped me back to the gravel softly. She passed her hand over my shirt briskly, wiping parking lot dust off of me, her head bent down so I couldn't see her face and then did the same with the legs of my jeans. Those damn witchy golden-flecked amber eyes traveled up the length of my body to meet mine.

_My luck had gone flat as a cow's cunt._

"Shall we try that again?" she whispered. She took my arm again, and I walked her around, opening the door and letting down the chrome step. She climbed up into the cab like she was fixin' to mount a horse sidesaddle, and those legs just kept on stretching out further and further until they were one long, pale stretch of the road to heaven.

_~~ll~~_

After the freak show between Eddie and Jasper's little fairy in Maw an' Carl's parlor, I was certain she was ready to be rid of me. I opened the door of the truck again and watched her climb up, my throat full of regret. When I got in, she was looking down at M'Esme's gift with a confused and sad expression.

"Well..." I sighed. My seventy-year lucky streak had taken the first train south, my game went along for company.

"So what are we doing for an encore, Bubba?"

"Really?" I gasped. It came out soundin' like a 12-year-old girl.

Fuck my... _life?_

"Yes, really." She laughed, nudged at the cooler on the floorboard with her knee. "I assume you're planning on sharing some of this beer? Where are we going?"

"Well... there's someplace I'd like to show you," like a jackass, I got all shy over it. "I wanted to go look at the moon with you."

"Where?" If there was a way to look flirtatious and suspicious at the same time, Rose could do it. "I can see the moon from right here."

"My place that I... uh... like to go. Crack us open a bottle. It's a ways up 17."

We drove with the windows down, and I let her play DJ. She surprised me with Billie Holliday. After Georgetown, 17 was pretty much a straight shot, and I started getting a little lazy, just watching her taking slow sips of her beer and singing along with the music and not payin' much attention to the road.

She had her heels planted on the dash of the truck, and her hair blew wild in the wind, filling the cab of the truck with her scent. Damn if I wasn't feelin' drunk as a boilt owl, all full-up with that Rose-smell and the sight of them long thighs underneath that sweet white material. She didn't look at me for a while but damn sure knew I was looking at her. It was like she put on a little show for me: wrapping her red lips around the bottle, drinking, pulling her lips away from the amber glass and barely tracing her upper lip with the tip of her pink tongue.

Just my luck, I was all googly-eyed and completely under the spell of Billie and her voice with Rose's laid over it. That scent of honey and sun-baked cut grass was just pourin off the most beautiful vampire woman I'd ever come across, and there I was havin' to drive. Damn. Shit like that never happened in them Silhouette Desire books.

'Course _I'm_ not a romantic hero or nothin'.

"Hey Bubba…?" she turned her eyes to me, amused.

"Yeah?"

She looked away and back again. _Aw... playing shy after that little show with the bottle. That's cute._

"Emmett..." she nodded towards the road.

"What?"

"Are you going to stop or something?"

"Huh?"

I looked forward. There in the headlights I saw we were barreling at 112 mph towards a deer standing stupidly hypnotized in the middle of the north bound lanes of Highway 17. Vampire reflexes are one thing, American engineering with a lift kit is another, and I'd be damned if I was gonna test the last gant's ass of luck I had left, hit the brakes and roll _Eddie's_ _truck_. I pulled the wheel to the right as much as I could and managed to keep it upright but still clipped the deer.

_Damnshitfuck!_ _Just the time for my cocksuckin' luck to run out._

I slowed it down to 50 so I could start to flip a bitch, and as soon as I did, Rose was out the door and gone.

There in one second, my destiny shifted again for good.

I could see her in the moonlight leaping towards the thrashing deer, and I swung the truck around in the median, spraying grass and sand and flaming pink crepe myrtle flowers everywhere. She faced the deer, but when the 250's headlights hither, she turned and smiled at me. _Again! Twice–in one night! How fuckin' lucky can I get? _The headlights made that little dress she had on look more like mosquito net than fabric, and I saw a perfect outline of her body.

She knew it, too.

She parted those damn long legs, totally spread eagled, bent over from her waist to the deer. I caught me a lucky glance of them unders of her's, too: white lace g-string, all sugar and spice with a little ruffle and bow nestled right above her ass. In one swift, elegant motion Rose broke that unfortunate deer's neck, and it stopped strugglin'. With one glossy red nail, she barely opened the jugular vein on the deer and caught a drop of blood on her finger. Legs still splayed open, she turnt at the waist and looked back at me invitingly.

"Hey, Big Pappa... supper's ready." she said softly, tipping her head back, her finger right over her mouth.

I saw the blood shimmer, like a thick liquid ruby, and it dropped in a perfect hot, salty orb onto her tongue.

_Yeah. _

I'm Bubba Cullen. And _I AM_ the luckiest dead sumbitch in South Cackalakee.

* * *

~Yeah! So, please do leave a bit of that gracious, feisty love for winterstale~

When you're done, run on over to winterstale's profile: she has Emmett's comin' out of her ears, rollin' off her tongue, slidin' out her fingers. And these aren't just any old Em's—each one is brilliantly imagined with a full arsenal of personality and character. _Sensual, sexy, funny, somber and so real you can picture him in your own house. Vampire, human, DOM-mett..._you simply won't believe all the many things she's done with this man

Both winterstale and I are up for Twific AH Awards in Best Author of the Year cat—go love on us . Link on my profile!

winterstale: Much love to Viola Cornuta and goldenmeadow, my dearies, for ... everything.  
Gratitude and _a box of aspirin tablets_, as Blanche duBois would say, to Miss V, who beta'd the mess of ellipses, dashes, and funky italics which I am so very fond of.

The ladies of the DW...top shelf, all the way. Grope you all, h00rs.

He says he ain't no romantic hero but I think he's mighty fine. Thanks, Miss Rie for letting me play with Bubba.


	12. Found

Extremely epic, excruciatingly enormous love to my beautiful and patient duo of Vanessarae and Viola Cornuta.

Disclaimer: Nope, nada. Non, and Hell No. Twilight doesn't belong to me (us). This unusual ditty is the work of Gasaway Alley and Rowan Moon and uses my characters with all their eccentric, southern quirks.

~~This is uncannily brilliant! This is heart-stopping, show-stopping, pulse-pounding, incredible precision—eerie, scary, Southern, insane, conniving and sexy. I have to say it: Gasaway Alley and Rowan Moon blew my fuckin' mind. Enjoy.~~

There is a section in the story below that refers back to a chapter in Dead Confederates. You'll recognize it, because you've read it, right?

* * *

**Found**

_**Mississippi State Mental Hospital, 1927**_

Clusters of cobwebs swayed with a ripple of movement as the ghost rushed past. Excited to show Alice what she found, she wavered between being completely invisible to forming an illusory trick of light and shadow; her main concern was not concentrating on keeping her form.

_"Come Alice... it's so pretty, just perfect for your collection of treasures," _her disembodied voice laughed.

Skipping barefoot along the cold-bitten cement floor of the long-ago abandoned basement ward, Alice followed after the wisp of ghostly energy down the dimly-lit hall. The vapor lamps sputtered, dying out momentarily as the spirit approached them, flaring anew once she passed by. Alice didn't really need the light; she loved the blackness of night, and feared nothing as she crept about; a dancing, darkling shadow, gliding from one dank, deserted room to the next. Every night after lights out, so as not to make the rusty coils of her bed creak, Alice would very carefully slip out of bed then fly down the stairs to seek out supernatural spirits to play with.

She felt like their Queen of the Underworld, the spirits obeying and catering to her every whim. They loved her dearly, often trying to please her by performing impressions of long-dead historical figures or showing her various personal items and trinkets that had been lost or forgotten by the staff members or patients of the hospital. This simple nightly game of hunt and seek got Alice through the hollow haze of her day. She hid her pirated booty easily within her dismally thin, lumpy mattress; all her brightly colored buttons, a broken necklace, some scraps of black tulle and a shiny solitary pearl were among her favorites.

She learned very quickly that if she wanted less drugs and the dreaded "electro-shock" therapy, she needed to be quiet and compliant, so she spent most days in bed, feigning sickness so as not to be bothered with. The day nurses would be simply shocked if they saw how different Alice was in the dense embrace of the gloaming.

As her phantasmal friend rounded the corner, a shiver splintered through her, quickening her pulse, making the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention. Her body was warning her there was something other than harmless, otherworldly apparitions skulking about. She inhaled deeply, catching the unmistakable sweetness in the air, overpowering the habitual smells of dampness and mold. She froze mid-step and closed her eyes. Waiting. She had caught this scent many times before... but never this strongly.

He was close.

Closer than he'd ever been before.

Perhaps tonight he would finally make the decision to take her.

In her mind's eye she could see bone-white, outstretched fingers reaching for her, shaking, desperate to touch even just the ends of her short, disheveled hair. Those fingers frantic to rein in their thready control... for this being was a hairsbreadth from snatching her up and snapping her like a twig.

She knew the breathless body standing behind her was a vampire. What the vampire didn't know was _she_ had been waiting for _him_.

Her first warning of his presence came from the instinctual _fight or flight_ feeling she experienced off and on, indicating she was being watched by something very dangerous. Her second warning came from the ghosts she had befriended. They told her outright the skulker was a vampire, even foretold her death by his hand, should he continue to stalk her.

Alice had no fear of demise. In fact, she welcomed it. She knew her stalker's venomous kiss would be the only way she could be like Jasper, her one true love who waited for her leagues along the line of time in the future, for he was a vampire, too.

Besides the bright, shiny baubles found for her by her phantom friends, her visions of Jasper were the only things that brought light and color to her dreary grey life. He was her constant, hardwired into her very soul. Remembering nothing of the family that brought her here, Alice had no doubt her obsession with Jasper helped land her in the institution; she cared for nothing except figuring out a way to bring him her love. Being changed into a vampire so she could weather the passage of time while searching for him was a key point in her plan to do just that.

Anxious and tired of waiting, she was more than ready to turn the tables on this twisted game of cat-and-mouse. Without a thought for her own safety, the tiny, fearless, fey-like woman whip-turned to face her huntsman.

Shocked, the vampire only had enough time to pull back the hand gravitating boldly for her ebony hair. Alice placed her hands on her hips and looked up the 6-foot length of his body and saucily quipped, "What do you want with me?"

"You don't want to know." An eerie grin slid lazily across his features. He knew she was brave, but he had no idea she was this brazen. Arrogant even. Most definitely insane. He liked it. Very much.

"Well, then, _sir_," Alice sneered and turned to walk away, calling his bluff, "you know nothing about me."

He reappeared in front of her. She tried to suppress her smile as the satisfaction of having him right where she wanted him washed over her.

He leaned down to look into her steely-grey eyes. The red, otherworldly sheen of his irises gave her goose-flesh, and the visceral reaction to run coursed through her veins, making him smile all the more as he watched the blue veins under her thin, pale skin engorge. He could hear the valves dilate to accommodate the rush of his hunter-heart's desire. His mouth filled with venom, which he swallowed in an unseemly gulp before he spoke., "I know your name is Alice, and you don't belong," the intruder curled his upper lip in disgust and gestured around them, "here. You are special."

"Special, you say? To whom? You?" Alice goaded. "Just where do I belong then?" Her heart beat like a jackrabbit's.

His grin widened, as he thought of her hot blood running over his tongue.

The cheekiness amused him. Apparently she had neither the wit nor the wherewithal to properly fear him. James knew there was a reason why he wanted this little one for himself.

The Volturi were the worst demons on the planet you would ever want to run from, but he finally understood what he had been wrestling with for months as he watched her: _she was worth it_. His decision was made.

"With me."

He held out his hand. She took his measure, noting how his hair was a white-blond, not honeyed like Jasper's. He was taller and more muscular but... he would do.

_For now._

_**New Orleans, Louisiana**__, __**February, 1991**_

Alice could hear the revelry of Bourbon Street a few blocks down. The loose lines of freestyle jazz competing with the squeezebox whine of Zydeco music drifted above the shouts and screams of the crowds walking drunkenly from bar to bar. Mardi Gras was about to start, and the tourist traffic was thickening. It was a humid February evening, the clouds hanging low with the promise of rain, when her preternatural gift of prescience whispered and waggled its disembodied fingers at her to stay open for business despite the impending bad weather. The electricity of change was in the air; she could feel it in her immortal, iron bones.

She looked around her beloved shop; candles of all shapes and sizes were the only light in the room, casting their otherworldly orange glow over all of the occultish bric-a-brac placed about with careful precision. How she loved setting this stage. The doors were covered with curtains of black and red beads. Skulls and a few taxidermied ravens perched on the windowsills, with brightly colored scarves used as window coverings. The room held a heady potpourri of patchouli, pot, and burning candles. The altar took up the back wall of the room, as no self-respecting Voodoo Priestess would be without an altar.

The centerpiece of the altar was a three-foot tall statue of Papa Legba, otherwise known in Christian circles as Saint Peter the Gatekeeper. Candle wax covered his feet; half smoked cigars, tumblers of rum, wilted flowers and bits of cake had been placed in dishes of offering before him. Alice had done some extensive reading on the Santeria religion of the area to get it just right. Positioned in the middle of the room was a small, round table, covered in a black, silk tablecloth which complimented the highly polished gleam of a large, quartz crystal ball.

Of course, Alice needed none of these items to help with her visions... but the humans seemed to like them. She found the irony endearing; so, she would wrap the truth of her gift within the garish dressing of the fortune-telling trade. Perhaps it was overkill using so many props most considered sacred, but she had no fear of being called out by the real thing. Any voodoo practitioner would know immediately Alice was a vampire, and to leave well enough alone if they valued their life. They weren't the only ones that could talk to spirits. Alice didn't have to sacrifice poultry to do it either.

By the dawn of the 1990s, New Orleans had long been embracing the sinister and sacred as part of its culture thanks to Anne Rice and her pseudo-macabre, pussy vamps.

Alice was in heaven.

She fashioned her own look for her work wardrobe, a gypsy-goth spin only she could truly pull off and not look garish. Though her background was a smorgasbord of local and secular occult magicks, the look was all about Alice's flair for the unconventional. Black, flowing skirts moved with her body like a liquid veil; all lace and tulle and netting. Steel-boned, waist cinching demi- corsets over blousy peasant tunics; the billowing sleeve caps floated over her arms like wings. Some nights her overzealous flair for the farcical would pull her towards wearing swathy headdresses, as well as bangles and ornaments dripping from every exposed finger, wrist, ankle, and bare toe to enhance her ensemble. Her apparel was matched by her hair and makeup. Outrageous wigs, smoky kohl lined eyes, decadent apple cheeks, a Monroe-mole on her upper lip, and rouged lips would complete her crazy costume.

James turned up his nose at her scene setting, spending most of his time skulking around in the back room when he wasn't out preying. She knew he would push her to move on soon. He got snaky if they stayed in one place for too long. His paranoia was something she would often use to her advantage.

Recently they had made the switch to taking only the blood of animals. James had told her stories of "vegetarian" vampires with golden eyes he had come across in his travels. Realizing this was why her Jasper's eyes had turned from red to caramel, Alice immediately set about convincing James that if they changed their diet it would be harder for the Volturi to track them, as there would be no bodies left behind in their wake. She had a hell of a time trying to convince him to come to New Orleans so she could set up her own shop to purge the tourists of their vacation money for their futures.

_"What the hell, woman? You want to set up a fortune telling booth in the middle of vampire central? The Volturi will be on to us quicker than flies on fresh shit!"_

_Curling her lip up at his crassness she growled, "Fucking Volturi, that's all I ever hear while you drag me all over hell's half acre." Alice chuffed out. __"Can't do this, can't work that job, the Volturi might find us," she parroted, the sarcasm thick and dripping off her razor tongue. "It's been over 60 years, James, since you screwed them and took me for yourself... I think we can stop looking over our shoulders. At least for a while. You know I would tell you if we were in danger."_

_Coyly, cunningly, she added, "Isn't that why you took me in the first place?"_

_The lies rolled easily off her tongue. _Must be all the practice I've gotten over the years_,__ she thought darkly to herself. She would like nothing better than to be rid of James, but she needed him. Someway, somehow, she would figure out how to use his talents for finding Jasper, as her visions were not very helpful with the 'where', they were more about the 'when'.  
_

_She sidled up to him, and ran her fingers up and down his arm, batting her eyelashes at him.  
_

_He sighed the sigh of a man who was used to giving in to the whims of his woman; a schlepped man played like a finely tuned Stradivarius.  
_

_The next week a very smug and content Alice was looking at storefront property. Her inner sidhe pointed her in the right direction, and when she found the right haven, an orgasmic shudder laddered up her spine, hit every nerve ending, and shattered out her fingers and toes.  
_

The rain began to patter against the windowpanes, bringing her back to the present. Sheets of water then drummed against the glass, seeking asylum inside with Alice. Loud shouts could be heard as the straggling celebrants downtown took cover. Outside, a drenched dame peered in the windows of the shop, an anticipatory smile crept across Alice's face as she dreamily read ahead, smoking on a cheroot, considering her luck. This was the one she was waiting for. She could feel it prickle across her mind as her ability woke for the task at hand. Not many souls would brave this magnitude of rain flailing at them. Mother Nature made sure she drove all the humans away except this one. The young woman flounced in through the hanging beaded curtain, shaking the offending water from her long, brown hair.

"Don't you just love the rain?" The girl asked jokingly, completely oblivious to the momentous occasion, looking around with wide eyes at Alice's strange and exotic showroom.

Barely able to speak from her choking need to see how this woman's thread was woven amongst her own steel strands, she evaluated the human in front of her. This woman-girl was most definitely essential on her road to Jasper. Yes, she was the one who would bring about the catalyst to change everything for the better. Alice had had enough of this limbo existence with a vampire she despised.

"Yes, I do." Alice agreed in her charming accent, "Welcome to my parlor," _says the spider to the fly._ "I am Madame Alyssandra."

"Um, hi, I'm Renee Higginbotham." She held her hand out for Alice to shake. Alice, however, was unwilling to take the proffered greeting for fear of her coldness. Instead she merely gestured towards the table and looked Renee right in the eyes, causing the human to reel her hand back in embarrassment and root herself to the floor. _Rapt_.

"I have answers to your questions, or I can offer you a towel while you wait for the rain to stop?" She concentrated on inhaling and exhaling her cheroot as she held back her need to let her eyes roll back in her head and let the visions come.

Renee scuttled to the chair offered by the Madame, trying to quell her nerves now that she was here. She'd wanted to come inside all week, but the broody blond creep skulking in the back room scared the bejebus out of her. He always carried his face at a downward angle so he was looking up at you like he was sizing you up for a coffin, or dinner.

Settling down, she fingered the wet Benjamin in her pocket. Renee knew this would be costly since everything in New Orleans this time of year was ridiculously expensive. But, she had to know how her future would turn out. _Especially now...  
_

Removing the sorry looking crumpled currency, she wiped it on her blouse, a futile gesture since the fabric was just as drenched. Her cheeks flaming, she straightened out the bill as best she could, and placed it on the table. The portentous Madame swiftly placed an elegantly manicured hand over the bill, her black nails a flash of jet against the calla lily glow of her skin. In a twinkle of a candle flame, the Ben Franklin disappeared within the folds of her Gautier Goth ensemble.

Alice took her place on the richly adorned red and black leather chair. Placing her hands over the crystal ball, she kicked the UV light beneath so it shined through the crystal, and it came alive with luminescence as if by her own skimming touch. It made her hands sparkle and wink, mesmerizing her captive audience. An audible gasp escaped Renee's lips.

A convulsive rush of visions pushed through her with hot promise. She placed all of her concentration on taming the flow and editing what came out for the unassuming human in front of her:

_A filmy flickering panorama of a wedding, both bride and groom wore white. Renee was beaming with happiness in a mermaid-style wedding dress, the tulle flared out like meringue on a pie just below her knees. _

Alice tried not to show her distaste of the crinkled, over-processed perm Renee scrunched and teased out to look like petrified plumage fanning around her face.

_The groom was facing her, holding her small hands in his large, sweaty, shaking ones. He was red as a beet against all that white. This groom didn't know a thing about grooming either. He had black hockey hair, a pseudo-mullet for jocks, all offset by a considerable mustache. His cowboy boots were white to match his suit with a bright royal blue cummerbund displayed loudly. He rivaled the church decor plastered with cheap crepe ribbon and bows hanging symmetrically all over the pews and doorways. _

_"Tacky, tacky." _Alice tsked to herself.

_Tears threatened the groom's masculine code to remain stoic as he said his vows. "I, Charles Swan, take for my wife, Renee Higginbotham..."_

"You will marry Charlie Swan."

Renee's face came alive, and she gasped. She knew this gypsy woman was the real thing!

Alice saw how deeply in love this woman was, and watched as Renee ghosted her hand over her still-flat belly. The single endearing action caused a second scene to roll Alice's murky grey matter into a ferocious undertow; her hands moved away from the crystal ball and clawed the edge of the table:

_A toddler with chestnut brown pigtails pacifying herself with a ratty pink blanket was caught in the middle of her parents fighting. Renee had a suitcase in one hand and her daughter's in the other. Accusations flew, Charlie was as red as he was on his wedding day but for a completely different reason. She was taking his child away from him. He pleaded on his very knees as Renee slammed the door in his face; he stood up in a rage and ripped their wedding photo from the wall, whipping it at the door, splinters and glass exploding as the scene dissolved._

"The marriage will not weather the storms that plague it. You take his daughter from him."

Renee's hand flew to her mouth. "I would never..." she stopped mid-sentence as Alice went rigid in her seat, her fingers massaging her temples in a dramatic gesture alluding she was in pain. She wasn't, she just wanted Renee to shut up so she could concentrate.

_The inside of an old Dodge with a bench seat in the back. The cherub face of the toddler from her previous vision aged to pubescence, curled underneath a pile of blankets in the backseat. Clothing hung on hangers within the vehicle, creating an insular cocoon, but try as she might, the heartbreaking sobbing coming from her mother outside still managed to reach her ears. She threw the blankets off, peeling one out from the layers to take with her and opened the car door, Renee was sitting on the hood of the car, butting out her smoke in her empty coffee cup, wiping her tears awkwardly as her daughter approached. _

_"Bella! I'm sorry, baby, I didn't mean to wake you."_

_"It's alright, Mama. I wasn't tired anyway. See any constellations tonight?" The young girl hopped up to take a seat next to her mother, and wrapped her blanket around them both. Renee sighed and placed her head upon her daughter's shoulder, pointing up to the sky. _

The scene dissipated, but left its mark on Alice, who told Renee nothing of this vision, figuring the shock of the marriage she dreamed of ending so quickly was enough for now. Besides, Alice knew the dangers; the simple sweep of a butterfly's wings could cause storms. Veiled advice was given instead as she prepared for the next onslaught of Sight... its potential singing in her head loud enough to shatter glass.

"What is meant to be will be, Renee. There is nothing you can do to change it or you run the risk of Bella being something else entirely. Hard times make us stronger."

Renee's eyes brightened, "Bella? We name her Bella? What is she like?"

Closing her eyes, Alice placed her hands over the crystal ball once more as she waited for the next vignette to coalesce for divination:

_About a hundred students in black caps and graduation gowns sat on little white folding chairs outside on a beautiful spring afternoon. Bella, now a full grown woman and a stunning beauty, walked across the podium to receive her diploma, all grins and pride for her accomplishment. _

"She is breathtaking. Long brown hair, brown eyes like her Daddy, a figure like yours only curvier... I can see her graduating high school right now. She's so proud."

Tears formed in Renee's eyes. She pawed through her purse for Kleenex. After blowing her nose loudly, she asked, "What about her father... does he still... even though...," her lip quivered miserably.

Alice was getting impatient; this session, which held so much promise before it began, was sputtering to an end with no answer to how Renee and her daughter were tied to her and Jasper.

In answer, the 8-mm movie of Bella's graduation replayed for Alice, starting up as if queued from a cut in the roll.

_Charlie, older, still sporting the Selleck 'stache, but the grey was peppered along his sideburns. He wore a shirt and tie, the suit coat thrown over his arm, walking purposefully towards his daughter, who peeled herself away from a beautiful bronze haired..._

Vampire!

Alice froze, a gothic gargoyle perched upon her leather throne. The power of speech, gone. She reached for her sketch pad and began drawing Bella's face on the parchment. Renee trembled as she saw the face of her daughter come to life, pleased her fortune teller was so gifted she could be given this glimpse.

"Her father is at her graduation. She's greeting him with a beautiful man on her arm. He must be her boyfriend."

_Daddy dearest seemed oblivious to the fact that his daughter, looking like a deviant debutante in her flirty, buttercream dress, was dating a vampire. The deadly erotic vampire man-boy was salivating over her, eyes roving over her frame, but looking away at the precise moment Charlie could have caught him eye fucking his Bella. Uncanny. Beyond instinct. _

_Like he knew in advance._

An immature squeal erupted from Renee when she saw the drop-dead beauty of the boyfriend beside Bella smolder back at her in black shade and sculpted angles as Alice continued to sketch frantically.

"What about friends? Does she have friends? My mama always says the more friends a girl has, the more goodness in her heart."

Nearly scoffing at the inane question, considering her daughter was meat on a tray for this vamp... Alice paused with a feeling of vertigo when she realized the vampire had golden eyes. Just like... of course! The connection snapped into place as another scene formed:

_Bella was in the same graduation day dress, but the scene was set at a County Festival of some sort. There were people dancing all around her as her voice addressed out-of-sight individuals._

_"So, what's y'all's stories?" _

Experiencing a feeling of being sucked backwards and rotated to see Bella's view, Alice inhaled sharply as she realized she was looking at herself.

And Jasper.

Nineteen more years. Nineteen more years and she would be with him!

Stunned, Alice watched herself answer Bella freely with the truth of what she was.

_"Alice Brandon, Mississippi State Insane Hospital, 1927, sired by James, formerly of the Volturi and now destroyed. By my hands."_

Alice tried to control her grim glee in the confirmation she would get the satisfaction of killing James herself. A smile pulled at the corners of her mouth as she fantasized darkly about the deed.

Renee was enthralled, not caring Alice had fallen silent in her absorption of what she was seeing, her hands gliding quickly over the parchment, the charcoal pencil making scratching sounds as the images came to life. Alice added a man with long, light colored hair. His eyes held a kind of patience she only saw in the very old and wise. He too, was very handsome.

_"Jasper Whitlock, Confederate Army Major, ma'am. Turned in 1863, the year of the Gettysburg Address, in Texas. About ten miles from my momma's doorstep, actually." _Alice heard sadness in his voice, _"Mad-bitch Maria made me what I am, made me the commanding officer of her army of newborns. I done some bad shit, Bella." _

Alice's eyes shimmered with the tears she was denied. The sound of her lover's voice heard for the first time in its true form was a sonorous tonality shattering her stone heart into sand, drifting and funneling to the other side of the hourglass. So much time spent searching, and she never felt so close and so far away from him at the same time.

The image of him began to evaporate, the loss of him ripping through Alice with stunning force. She was more resolved now than ever to get to him, especially since the 'when' walked through her door tonight. Bella Swan was her benchmark in time.

A sharp flare of pain ripped across Alice's skull.

_No. Bella was more. Oh Jesus! Much much more._ The charcoal, worn to a nub on the end of her forefinger, had just enough left to write across the vellum in perfect calligraphic script:

_Swan...Cullen...Volturi. _

The i was dotted, their destinies crossed-she looked upon her sketch and cursed silently to herself.

_Fucking Volturi. There was no escaping them._

Carnelian eyes snatched upon Renee's blue, the pupils dilated, Alice's words tight and deliberate.

"Who are the Cullens?"

"I... I don't know. I've never heard that name before."

Alice attempted to scan ahead. All she spied was a vision of James walking through the back entry of the shop about one minute from now.

Crumpling the sketch in one hand, she leaned across the table towards Renee and hissed ominously, "You must go. The one who kept you away from here all week is coming back, and he must not see you here."

"What? Why..."

"You are not for him. Leave. Now." Alice shoved the damp C-note at Renee making no apologies for her rudeness. There was no time.

The chair scraped across the floor as Renee stood abruptly, clawed at her money, and shoved it in her purse while she walked backwards, white as a sheet. At the door, she turned and ran blindly out into the pouring rain. Out into the arms of her doomed marriage.

Alice breathed a sigh of relief. The woman was gone as she heard James' wet boots squeak across the tile floor in the back room. Her head was spinning in a million different directions. She wished she had more time with Renee, just to catch hints of her destiny. But if James saw anything relating to the Volturi like she had drawn from that divination, well... shit, news like that would _not_ buy her nineteen years to coerce him into finding Jasper, now would it?

She needed him.

He was the first and final piece of the endgame.

James silently weaseled into the room, sniffing the lingering curls of Renee's sodden scent in his disgusting predatory way. "Well, well, well. Who the fuck was that tasty dish?"

Hiding her peevishness, "Just another pigeon."

_**Chicago, Illinois, December 2009.**__  
_

_The mechanical whine of a forklift moving cargo echoed and reverberated off the walls in his cold storage warehouse. Jenks shut his office door, reducing the distracting noise to a muffled hum. His warehouse in the meatpacking district of Chicago was a front for his criminal career. Jenks had his hand in various pies throughout the city. He was good at what he did, which was work below the radar and not piss off any of the larger crime-syndicate families. What also helped was he used supernatural beings for some of his more high-end work. _

_Jenks was sweating profusely while sitting across his desk from the vampire. He had never been afraid of James; Alice, yes, James, no. He also knew this bloodsucker was the best Bounty Hunter he had ever met, and was thankful whenever the blond tracker would do jobs for him. James had only two conditions; no one could ever know who or what he was, and, he wouldn't do work which had anything to do with the Volturi. _

_Jenks was about to infringe upon the second and most important condition. _

_"I have the perfect mark for you, and before you say no, hear me out."_

_James gripped the arms of his chair as Jenks waddled his large frame over to the wall safe. Quickly rotating the dial with the combination, he pulled the brick-red leather dossier out from the void filled with bundles of cash and bonds. The Volturi insignia atop the flap made James go rigid in his seat. Jenks held up his hands in a submissive, friendly gesture while James eyed him coolly. He pled for his old friend to hear him out before he bolted._

_"This came across my desk about an hour ago. You're the first person I called about it, and the only person I know of who can find this coven since the Volturi can't." _

_James growled low and threateningly. Jenks then boldly stepped forward, lowering himself to look into his friend's disturbing coppery eyes, a few shades redder than Alice's. If Jenks didn't know any better, he'd think the vampire was off the animal bandwagon. Sipping the supper, as it were. _

_Steeling himself, he reached for the one thing he knew James wanted most. _

_"Finding this coven could gain you clemency from them."_

_James sighed. Considering it._

_"They seldom farm out a bounty as big as this, James. I know you've been on the lam from them for years, but just take a look before you decide." _

_With sweaty hands, Jenks passed the folder to James, who picked it open carefully, as if the very leather that bound the file was poisonous. His eyebrows rose up to his forehead when he took note of the Bounty offered, and he thumbed through the pictures in the file. _

Alice sat up in shock. As the scene in her vision still rolled on she saw James look over the photos of a verging-on-manhood vampire called Edward, then her Jasper. Her body shook with excitement, as she waited for James' answer. This was the job offer that would decide if she could get to him on time.

It was the end of December, 2009, and Bella was a senior in high school, somewhere. She was getting ready to graduate in late Spring, and for the past nineteen years, Alice had jockeyed and maneuvered James into position for this particular job. Being such a resourceful vampire, Alice realized the Volturi were looking for the Cullens also, and sooner or later, they would put out an APB to all their contacts, no matter how minor. She begged and pleaded with James for them to move to Chicago and do odd jobs for Jenks. Knowing the fat old coot wouldn't be able to resist the money to be made from the Volturian Bounty on the Cullens, he would try to pull James in on the job.

_James passed back the file and smiled indulgently at a crestfallen Jenks. The Bounty would have given Jenks a considerable percentage. He could finally retire and live out his life in poshness._

_Could have. _

_Now his retirement-plan shrugged his shoulders and said, "I have two well-known conditions, Jenks. No shittin' way." James vanished, the door closing slowly behind him. _

Anger streaked a black stain across Alice's dead heart as she realized he would cost her everything if he turned down this job.

It was time for Alice to roll the dice and risk it all. She prayed James loved her enough to do what was necessary. She had just enough time to call him before he took his meeting with Jenks.

After leaving Jenks high and dry, James rushed home knowing he was in for quite a scene when he got there. He recalled his conversation with Alice on the cell before going in to his meeting with Jenks;

_"James, you absolutely, positively MUST take the job Jenks offers you. Baby, it could set us up for life... we would finally be free of the Volturi."_

_"Now hold on there... what the hell are you talking about? Jenks knows better than to offer me a job involving the Volturi, he knows the rules and why I have them."_

_"But I saw him tell you if you took the job and succeeded, the Volturi brothers would grant you pardon for your... transgressions."_

_"It doesn't matter what Jenks thinks, Alice. I know how badly the V-Three want you, and they aren't about to broker me any deals. If he offers it, we are out of here."_

Hysteria brooked in Alice's voice. James knew she could really pour it on when she wanted, and he listened to her with practiced but thinning patience;_"I am not going on the run again, James. I'm sick of this shit. I swear to fucking God, if you don't take that job, I will light myself on fire. Do you hear me? Burn myself to ashes and make sure the Volts find out. Then, you will have nothing, and you will still be running from those pricks." _

Her histrionics were quite convincing, but James stoically reasoned that rules were rules, and they were what kept him alive all these years. Refusing the Cullen job, he prepared himself to tell his manic mate that they had to get the hell out of Chi-town. Anger simmered all along his nerves. He was tired of this shit too, but Alice had no idea how dangerous the threat really was. He didn't understand why she couldn't just give him this one reprieve.

Anything she wanted, he gave to her. They started working for Jenks, against his better judgment, so she could have her Rodarte fashions and fixed address in a Penthouse suite. 'When would it ever be enough, Lisa?' his Oliver asked.

Putting the key in the lock of _her_ Penthouse Suite, his body went into alarm mode when his nose caught whiff of a sickeningsweet, burnt smell. White smoke choked him in the doorway as his eyes zeroed in on a blackened mottle of brittle glass shapes resembling body parts and melted plastic from the tulle skirt she was wearing that morning. This was all that was left of her in the smoldering heap of ruin on the carpet.

James ran over to the sooty stain, sinking to his knees in grief.

"Sweet Jesus, _Alice_."

Shoving his hands into the smoldering ashes, he wiped it across his face moaning her name. Never in a million years did he consider taking her threat of self-immolation seriously. He knew her theatrics could be outrageous, but this...

It was when he stood sometime later, he found the letter. Trembling, charcoal stained hands left ash smudges on the white paper.

Three crazy cryptic sentences stared back at him.

_**You ruined everything. **_  
_**Now you will have nothing. **_  
_**Including me.**_  
_**~A**_

Shock forced him to read it a second time. Then a third. James turned it over, looking for more clues as to what Alice meant. He even looked through the stack of books on top of which the letter had been lying. Spying one of Alice's pads that held her sketches from her automatic drawing sessions, James noted it was one he'd never seen before. It was bursting with more paper folded and stuffed between various pages. He opened it up, and the world dropped away from him, placing him in the dark cold corner of clarity where nothing was ever as it seemed.

His whole relationship with her had been a lie.

He thumbed numbly through pages upon pages of sketches depicting Alice in some very compromising positions with a familiar face. A face he had only looked upon for the first time this afternoon in a photograph. Jasper Lee Whitlock. Wanted by the Volturi for association with the Cullen Coven; the bounty he had turned down... the bounty Alice wanted him to take so desperately.

The illustrated book read like a manual of manipulation constructed and carried out with creepy precision by Alice. He had been grifted by his own girlfriend… his own issue. For over 80 years she had led him across miles of water, earth and sky to find this Jasper. The deception burned him to the core, righteous anger taking root across his body. Rage itched along his palms, the need to destroy paramount. He would start with the sketchbook… large strong fingers gripped menacingly to rip it to millions of confetti-sized shreds.

But he stopped himself.

He could use this book.

He would find Jasper alright. To kill him. He would not be denied the closure only Jasper's end could bring for such a grievous wound to his soul. Then he would hand over the rest of the Cullens and ask for no purse. He simply wanted to be pardoned for his crime of desertion and thievery. Ruing the day he ever took that conniving harpy into his dead heart, he walked out of their Penthouse leaving everything behind. After he retrieved the Volturi file from a very surprised and excited Jenks, he began his search for Jasper as retribution for his broken heart.

_**Old City Jail, **__**Charleston SC, January, 2010**__**  
**_

James couldn't shake the feeling he was being watched, but then again, he was standing in the middle of the most haunted building in the city of Charleston, South Carolina. For over 150 years the Charleston jail was a prison and asylum, wherein many souls lost their lives under incomprehensibly unfortunate and cruel circumstances. Starvation and malnutrition being the smallest of the offences; torture and execution being the most violent. Alice would have loved this place. He came here feeling nostalgic, and stupidly sentimental, wanting to be in an environment that made him feel close to her, where the veil between the living and the dead was thin. Just as it had been in Mississippi, when he'd finally found her.

The lurking dread was a trick of his mind, he imagined. Akin to that sneaking feeling he knew his Alice had felt as he'd watched her, wanted her, and waited for her brave—and dire—capitulation so many years before.

Hopefully, it was thin enough so the bitch could hear him make the call to the Volturi about him finding the Cullens. Once he sent the proof via pictures they were living in Cainhoy, mainstreaming themselves as local yokels, he was going to kill Jasper Whitlock.

Keeping her wretched sketchbook had its drawbacks. The collection was an illustration of just how contrived their whole relationship had been. A blueprint of her lies that only drove the knife deeper in his back. Alice had mind-fucked him at every opportune moment to get to that bastard Jasper.

But, having the drawings to refer to as clues to find the son of a bitch proved quite useful. A good tracker knows the answers can always be found in the details; James studied her drawings; the background scenery, the clothing, the words sometimes scrabbled across a page here and there. Piecing together a cohesive timeline was not easy with so many alternate endings, but the Volturi file helped fill in the holes. This was a strange puzzle. The crucible was seeping himself in their doomed love story. He came to understand her drive. Jasper had been tithed to Alice long before him and was to remain long after. He burned the sketchbook once he memorized it. It would be disaster if it fell into the hands of the Volturi. There were things in there he doubted even his eyes should have seen, and he certainly didn't want to bother trying to understand it.

Debating for the final time whether or not he could call the Volturi and clear his name, he paused as he felt a cold rush of air hit him. A crinkled field of energy materialized. Short in stature, the figure was small, the hair short and dark. The face that still haunted his dreams was now stealing through the shroud into his reality.

_Alice._

She looked so sad; James actually hesitated to listen to the apparition.

_"Please. Please don't kill him. He's already lost me. He's as good as dead. Don't lose your soul over this, James. It's not worth it."_

The voice was thin and reedy. James' eyes narrowed.

"Liar! Go back to the rock in hell you live under, you treacherous, batty bitch! The lover you never knew will soon join you."

The spirit of Alice disappeared just as James felt the tingle of breath on the back of his neck.

Words cold as ice upon his skin, "No, James, _darling._ You first!."

A very solid Alice standing behind James grabbed his head in a powerful vise-grip, and twisted viciously, ripping it off, disassembling his body before he could even register his death was upon him.

It was simply over.

Hypnotically, with precise purpose, Alice burned her sire's body, each piece hissing and spitting at her while it succumbed to the flames. Tucking James' cellphone into her pocket, she glanced to her right as Lavinia Fisher-the first woman serial killer ever caught and executed-manifested beside her. Lavinia's filmy dream-form flickered and re-assembled to look exactly like Alice.

Feeding another piece of James into the fire, she smiled at her partner in crime. "You did a phantasmagorically good job, Lavinia, thank you for your help. You like that trick?"

"Oh yes," Lavinia grinned conspiratorially, "but how did you know I could do that?"

"The spirits in the asylum would put on shows for me when I was a child there. I was so frightened and alone, they took pity on me and made me laugh with impressions of dead historical figures. They were the ones who taught me spirits can mimic the form of anyone who has passed over into death, assuming it for short periods of time."

"You are dead?"

"Yes, Lavinia, I'm a vampire. Of course I'm dead."

"Is he dead?" The ghost gestured towards the burning remnants of James.

"Oh yes. He is very dead."

"Alice?" Lavinia asked, her voice small and secretive.

Alice merely raised her eyebrows in response.

Lavinia faded in and out, her form coalescing into Elizabeth Bathory, then Lizzy Borden. "Can you tell me about Jasper?"

"Some other time, but right now, I need to go to him." Standing up, free at last, Alice dusted herself off and smiled at her new friend. "Don't worry, I'll be back. James was right. I really do like this place."

"This was… _enjoyable_."

"Yes, Lavinia, it certainly was."

_~~ll~~_

**Jasper Lee Whitlock**

Jasper felt her careening in his direction, felt it in the dead marrow currently breast-stroking through his wrought-iron skeleton. Heard her disjointed call screaming his mother-given name from an unknown distance and space. Eons ago.

And now.

His glassy, peri-black painted '48 Ford F-1 couldn't move fast enough. That souped-up engine whined like a little cunt as he mashed on the chrome footprint pedal. The fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror were defying gravity, just like a picture he'd seen once in a magazine of a crucifix hanging from a rearview mirror with the Son of God holding on for dear life and nearly flying off it. The last time he'd seen the offensive Photo Shopped Jesus, he'd been speed-gluing the pages together with his own personal wank paste.

She was here in South Carolina; he could sense it. And, at his familial homestead, no less.

His own off-kilter life skeined home to rest. The red laser-pointer of anticipation acidized just to the left of his harsh chest plate; right where his dead, confederate heart lay unmoving. For just a moment, he felt the dried out, old vasculate gallop with the same velocity his Army charger would on the Texas Badlands. Then the feeling was gone, going silent as the whale-bone graveyard it was housed in.

Pulling up to Maw and Carl's, _she _was there. Waiting for him on the steps with Eddie. For a second, he knew jealousy. She was his, and the fact his family got to meet his mate before him rode rough on his nerves. For a moment, Jasper knew doubt.

It didn't last.

Her face spoke volumes. Her unleashed emotions promenaded a do-si-do right into him.

He already knew her name; Alice. His Alice. His incredible, edible Alice. Her eggshell skin bloomed with a million dark promises. Bright as an eclipse, her rat-a-tat funeral garb seemed fitting. Why wouldn't she be dressed to celebrate the death of their wanting and waiting for one another? She carried a tainted regality; all smoke, weeds, ash and shadow, her hair a dark, undercast crown of angel spikes and devil's wings.

She stole his reason to exist and rucked it into her heart's pocket.

Out of the truck quick as silver, he saw Eddie's stricken face. Felt his wretched determination, his finality, his dejection. Eddie looked away. Jasper did not.

Like an eighteen-wheeler hitching a semi, his draw-bar slid into her receiver. Now as a single unit, they stood toe-to-toe, straight as pewter soldiers until the very end when they threw off the last vestiges of their single, transient lives.

For they had been truly homeless until now.

Alice jumped first. Jasper caught her a split-time second after he forcefully threw his whittled toothpick down onto the ground.

A tornado to a volcano. A flash in a pan. Lips beat against each other, igniting into a maelstrom of churning lavatic ribbons as they fell to the earth. A fine flume of dust sailed into the air and settled upon them in a powdered terra confection.

Silent words were conveyed and questioned as Jasper picked his precious package up and settled her into the custom, creaky leather of his bench seat; although he was sure the freshly verathaned California Bull Pine boards of the truck bed might do just fine once they were away from the prying, scrying ways of his family.

"You hurry up, Jasper. Those pine boards are not for us just this minute. I've waited long enough."

"Yes'm. Just a minor thought." He grinned his awry half-smile at her.

Jasper fired up the rebuilt '76 Ford engine, and listened to the sound of the rocker valves seat and unseat the pistons. They caused the internal combustion needed to propel them to their destination. The din muffled by the aluminum valve covers mirrored the rush and ebb of venom through his veins. The polished '48 tore off with a roostertail's flurry of gravel and grit. Maw would not approve.

Alice moved to sit on his lap, straddling him with her short skirt hiking up around her svelte hips. Her shredded tights would have but a spider's web chance of surviving this trip home. She sucked on his neck, kissing every mark and scar. And, when she rolled her tongue into his ear, he very nearly lost the war. Nearly skittered off the blacktop into a ditch. Not that either one would have cared at this moment.

From the corner of his eye, he spied a church sign that read,

"_**I love you." **_

_**My name is God, and I approve this message.**_

Luxury Hollows never felt so far away. Nor nearer.

_~~ll~~_

Alice took in Jasper's not-anymore-bachelor pad, and decided this single-wide was the fucking Taj Mahal. A Mughal garden of architectural bliss. A Persian paradise.

Tattered rugs scattered atop the worn seventies-era plush, pile-style carpet, and ratty pillows were haphazardly thrown about with no real furniture to speak of. She skimmed her fingers along his dusty memories knick-knacked along sagging, faux-wooden-paneled walls. All lonely salt-and-pepper shakers of his travels.

Alone no more.

Jasper watched her touching his useless memorabilia and marveled at her marbeline features before tucking into her lips again. His cock bowed out, mashing between their seeking bodies and his fly. Alice wasted no time in molding her hand to his considerable out-dent, palming and squeezing.

He stilled her while trying to regain his shaky leash on the spillway. Jasper was no stranger to a quick skinny dip into warm wells, but this was different. He hadn't been with another vampire since Mad Maria made and maimed him.

"It's okay, Jasper. You don't have to hold back, lover. Come and get it." And with that, Alice disappeared into the bedroom.

Slow as a turtle, he smiled and made his way to his pecker room, all the while stripping himself to just his jeans. With his hands on his belt buckle, he entered the doorway and stopped short. Alice lounged on the bed, spread eagle, knees up with nothing but her Coming to God Suit on. The sight of her kissable pink slash so perfectly displayed, nearly undid him again.

She openly ogled his swollen junk while he popped the two-pound buckle free of the leather, then let the rest of the metal rivets fly loose so the panels flapped and furled at his rangy hips. Her wheat-grass eyes rounded then shuttered while she drank in the sight of his girthsome pole standing at full mast. Jasper looked down at his mighty prick saluting him, and smirked. He was about to be balls deep in this witchy woman.

Nubile fingers hooked and beckoned. Jasper licked his lips and answered her call by letting his time-worn jeans drop, the heavy buckle making a mute thunking sound on the outdoor-grade carpet. Cradling right up to her crook and cranny, he grabbed her fairy chin between his thumb and pointer finger and kissed her hard enough to chase away any of her shadows. This kiss was meant to erase nightmares, meant to stake and brand her as his.

Alice was not one to be dominated. She'd had plenty of that in her life, and she gave back as good as she got. One kleptotic hand found its way into his dredged-flour and honey hair, while the other mischievous hand snuck to his saddle-honed ass to knead and squeeze.

Heavy passion radiated from Alice and slammed deep into Jasper. She knew exactly what she was doing; fucking him from the inside out. Her tongue mated deeply with his, showing him exactly where she wanted him.

She was an unearthly maven all right, and everything Alice felt or tasted crowded out of her only to steep back into Jasper. His sympath ways fed from her, bled from her. On groveling hands and knees, his scarred sheen of skin flayed for her, leaving him exposed, wonderfully fashed open. He was lost.

He slid down the bed, enjoying the rasp of the coverlet on his cock and pushed her feathery thighs wide. Placing a hand on each delicate piece of flesh, Jasper grinned a toothy grin, then swooped in and bit down superficially on each side before sucking tenderly on her tight skin. He pushed her open even farther with the palms of his hands so he could gaze at her from stem to stern, pucker to pubis pearl. Tongue lolling out, Jasper licked her starting from the bottom straight to the top. Once at the top, curls parted, her fleshly button perked and jerked into his drawn lips. Applying hard suction, the nub distended and issued a staccato pulse.

Loud and verbal, Alice let Jasper know exactly how he made her feel. Soon, he absorbed it all and went sexually nuclear enough to make any living being within a ten-mile radius feel inexplicably horny. The feral trailer park pussies went at it, caterwauling and spitting just like the minx underneath his lips. Shit, even the fucking nocturnal crickets starting chirping in mid-daylight.

"That's right, baby. Right there," Alice dictated as she sat up and grabbed his hair, hard. "Suck it."

"Darlin', that's_my_ line." Jasper stated from around her clit.

"Huh. Not anymore." She smiled evilly and pushed into his mouth greedily.

Jasper let go of her clit and pulled back to watch as he sunk two fingers into her gleaming slit. Scissoring them, he stiffened his tongue and laved in between the long digits, then pushed down on her back disc with his thumb.

Alice nearly stood straight up on the bed as she came in a gale force rush. Jasper held onto her like an eight-second bull rider to subdue her until she subsided.

Crazed and energized, she flipped him onto his back. Alice was no _Debbie Does Dallas_, but she gave it her all, relishing him, worshipping him. She pounced on his rod with the fervor of a woodpecker on an oak tree, his short hairs tickling her nose with each pass. When she added her hand to the motion, Jasper groaned, his head lolling back momentarily on the pillow. She traced the thick ridge and valleys from the head all the way down to the heavy spheres lying tight inside the pouch. One ball hugged higher than the other, the ruched seam dividing them fascinated her. Entranced, she bit down on the thick sac testing the pliable feeling under her incisors, then let go and licked at the skin while she continued to stroke him.

Her mouth and tongue were gifts from the southern god, Billy _Bob_. And God, how she could bob. Jasper so very badly wanted to come down her throat and watch her swallow, and swallow, and swallow him whole. He felt the sting and boil threaten low in his belly. Then something deep in his chest shifted and by the look on Alice's face, she felt it too. They both felt the insane need to complete this marriage of souls.

Alice straddled and reared up to impale herself; quickly, desperately, giving him full view of her taut, pear-shaped breasts. They were petite and white just like the rest of her frame. Perfection. Jasper grabbed her lithe hips and ground her down on his cock, then lifted her to watch himself shuttle back in and out of her hungry pussy. The thick mushroom head popped free, slick with her nectar, then disappeared inch by nine inches into her crushing sheath.

Jasper wrapped his honed arms around Alice's back and began to feast on the luscious fruit offered to him. Her quarter-sized areoles drew into diamond points inside his mouth. He latched on and sucked hard, using his teeth to scrape and rake at the reinforced weights.

She continued to screw down tightly on his dick, the bed groaning under their onslaught. Luckily the box spring was buttressed with cinder blocks. A vampire of his sexual caliber needed all the fortification for fornication he could get. All king size, the queens in here were long gone. He had a monarch-winged fey perched on his branch now.

Both began to growl deeply, the double whammy of what was coming loomed just within reach. And, then it happened.

All nutting hell broke loose.

Alice threw her head back and screamed. Jasper let go of her tit and clamped his teeth down on her collarbone, slicing through the agate skin to the mercurial osseous beneath. He felt his balls draw up tighter than a boxer's fist and felt the crush of fluid punching its way out. Her box squeezed and squeezed him, her clit rigid and thrumming against his other bone. They came together, making bedlam of their souls. Souls that sparked and arced higher and higher into nirvana, then crashed down, locked together in one cell. For life.

_~~ll~~_

All-seeing Alice was a force to be reckoned. Slip of the fingers, and nimble of feet, she walked toes-only on this earth. Those spells of hers prodded into his psyche, slashed straight through to his cortex. She intuitively shared everything she spied in that crazy minds-eye of hers. Every time she had an episode, he'd watch her elfin face dance into a vampire grin almost as if she enjoyed those previews playing out.

Heteronormative: a kooky conundrum of a word! She left him full, yet aching. Always eerily grieving for her while she stood right next to him; inside him. Being the Equal Opportunity Fucker, Alice parted Jasper from his need for a symbiotic Tom, Dick, and Harry-foolery type of satisfaction. Nope, he was on the straight and narrow for this train ride... reformed.

_No longer searching for oblivion.__  
_

And, how this goth-clad raven ever chose to align with him, Jasper would never comprehend. Alice made him a General from a Major, a leader in this army of two. It was never his to question, only revel and swim in deeply still waters. Yes'm, their jagged little murky pond.

Meeting up with his brothers and sisters-in-arms, Alice, the ever-knowing egret, wowed Jasper by bringing home a sleek crotch rocket she could ride and negotiate like his johnson. He pulled the lamb-hide cover off his own pride and joy, his Orange County Choppers, Prisoners of War, custom cycle from out of storage. He turned the key in the ignition and twisted the throttle, enjoying the deep warble the Rev-Tec engine provided. The pipes sang the sad tune of all those lost in war.

They had a job to do. Volturi vulture scouts were here and needed to be taken care of. Jasper would do anything to save his family; Alice would do anything to save Jasper.

When the preventive maintenance deed was done, and each party fired off into the night, Jasper and Alice went back to their trailer trove of love. Jasper parked his bike, but Alice stayed on hers. After watching her man, a killing thing, raze that froggy, rope-haired vampire with her help, she wanted him with a vengeance. They'd committed pre-meditated, first degree murder together all Natural Born Killers-like. Nothing said '_I love you_' as much as manslaughter.

"You wanna ride mine?" Alice hinged the throttle for effect.

A slow smile crossed his features. "Hell yeah."

She slid to the back seat, riding bitch so Jasper could be the White Knight to her Black Betty.

Jasper laid low over the tank and knew no need to tell Alice to lean with him. When he zigged, so did she. Instead of a testosterone laden peel-out, he lazily started forward, carefully crunching over the uneven dirt and gravel lane out of Luxury Hollows.

Once clear of the metal trash bin houses, Alice slipped her arms around Jasper's waist and cupped him through his leathers to find him already hard as the fiberglass tank it was trestled up to.

"You after something, darlin'?"

"Just go faster."

"Hold onto that wheelie bar, sweet tea, we're goin' ridin'."

In the dead of night, with no prying eyes except maybe a few cranked-out truck drivers, they sped up Clements Ferry Road to I-526, then I-26 where there were unending miles enough to go from Pond to Pacific.

Alice undid the zipper and parted the leather to have better access to Jasper's cock. It stood straight, just touching the edge of the fuel cap, as if it were the compass navigating their journey. She pressed it with her palm flat against the vibrating tank and felt him squirm. He gripped the sides of the Kawasaki firmly between his thighs and sped up even more.

Wanting to be free, Alice ripped her helmet off and set it a'sail into a tributary along the roadside; enjoyed the air ripping at her hair. On a split second decision, she ducked to the left side of Jasper while they rode in the fast lane. She balanced precariously on one foot peg and snaked her torso around his, bringing her head into the vee of his legs. Jasper let go of the handlebar and wrapped his arm around her for more support.

Surprised, there was _something new under the sun, _so to speak, the biker did a high-speed wobble for a moment when Alice's pert lips enveloped him, sucking him in to the deepest recesses of her mouth.

Road head just got a whole new meaning in Jasper's big black book of sexual proliferations. Shit, she gave _rode head_. He looked down to watch the back of her head piston over his pulsating prick. He began to count road signs, even shouted out the names on billboards to keep from knocking the bottom out of the back of her throat.

'Martin Luther King was a Republican' flew by, so did 'You never sausage a place - You're always a wiener at Pedro's', and 'There's plenty of room for all God's creatures. Right next to the mashed potatoes'.

_Amen.  
_

Alice's laughter only served to stir his ardor up even more. He felt his balls swell near to bursting as she polished his knob to a brilliant shine. The unbelievable softness of her mouth in sharp relief to her buckram tongue and blade teeth felt incredible. Her venomous saliva wet him more and more. He couldn't hold on any longer. A slick oil spill; an Exxon Valdez gusher burst onto her tongue, into her cavern until she had drunk him dry. She popped him free of her puffed lips, tucked him back in, and zipped him up with a zing.

The relief he felt along with the gratitude for his fortune told Alice all she needed to know, and she settled back in behind her man, happy for once, scanning the future, and forging their destiny.

"Hold me tight!" he half warned, half hoped.

They sped on in the blue glimmer of the headlight in front of them, and the dull red gleam of the single tail light behind them.

"_Always_." Alice promised.

* * *

~BRAVO! Holy Shit! Seriously, was that just completely incomprehensibly awe-inspiring? Please leave Gasaway Alley and Rowan Moon some love~

**Rie:**

Please check out their own stories: _Kick the Tires and Light the Fires _by the evidently raceway-inspired sexy guru, Gasaway Alley, and Rowan Moon's rich, supernatural tale _Broken Doll_ and the sequel, _From the Ashes_.

**Rowan Moon:**

A huge thank you to Rie for letting me play with Malice again and to Ape for weaving together this monstrosity with me and putting up with my epic case of backstory-itis. Special merci beaucoup to V & Vi for their beta brilliance and a huge hug to Vi for jumping in and pushing me forward as I was struggling up the hill!

Holy Mother of Cocktails! Did you see the size of this fucker? Epic I tell you. The spooky canting of a strange Southern Odyssey to the promised land of Cainwhore, South Carolina.

**Gasaway Alley:**

I would tell Rie thank you, but I do enough groveling around her sweet ass as it is. If it weren't for her ConfEddie and the South Cackalee Choir, I don't know what I'd be doing right now. Probably sleeping or some shit. However, she does deserve a huge round of applause (preferably right on her kiester) for putting up with our need for more time, then swooping in and smacking us on the jim bubblies with her piquant pen.

Vi (Thank Bubba for Vi) is an editorial genius for filling the donut holes in this story with her tongue and spice. Her wit is only surpassed by her ability to charm the pants off the Dorito Sniffin' Carl.

And, V, where the fuck you been lately? Oh that's right, blogging about how it really is (which, by the way, is hilarious), free-basing DC's, wining and dining an Heiress, and so on and so forth. I know you'll add the Christ'n commas, and allusive alliteration right where it needs to be.

**Eddie:**

Hey, at least I had a cameo in this one. Nice work, ladies.

So, about me. Been nominated for **The Vampies** (Golden—_gaddamn_—Onion cat. AKA Best Comedy)! Voting ends August 1st.

www(DOT)kwiksurveys(DOT)?surveyID=KLHJLF_a980722c&UID=2985593982

I've also been nominated for my filthy mouth and original and erotic sexual tendencies in the **Golden Lemons** (Best Dirty Talk & Best Creative Position, or some shit like that). Voting also ends August 1st.

www(DOT)kwiksurveys(DOT)?surveyID=KCOMLN_bd9343f3&UID=1602093106

And fuckin' finally, don't know if you've heard, but I gotta blog. It's southern, its sexy, it's provocative. The link is on my profile. You should go ;).

Oh yeah, Dead Condederates...Friday.

Cheers,

Rie~


	13. Indian Red

Right on. First, I fucking love my betas: Vanessarae and Viola Cornuta. Goes without sayin'.

Second, here's the deal. Occasionally I ask one of my very talented friends to write something for Dead Confederates (crazily, they usually say 'yes'). So I asked winterstale if she'd do a brand new whatever about whomever. And she was all southern coy and sweet and sly, 'Well, I have been thinking about this _particlur_ character.' _Yeah._ It's with the grandest smile and a hella lot of 'Fuck Yeah!' that we present…_Paul._

Disclaimer: WTFever. This is mine and ours. Trashy trailer park, knees-up, hoedown, PBR, plenty o'fucking, scary, drama, funny. Meh, but Twilight does not belong to me.

_The Mercy Seat, _Nick Cave:

www . youtube . com/watch?v=Bq6T2tvRDoY

**Indian Red**

_**Mighty cooty fiyo - hey la hey, hey la hey**_

_**Mighty cooty fiii-yo hey la hey, hey la hey**_

_**And I love to hear them call him Indian Red.**_

_Indian Red – Traditional_

**South Carolina, 2009**

Camaraderie. Brotherhood. Family.

These words meant nothing to Paul Lambert until he stopped across a West Ashley parking lot and saw the foulest creature he'd ever looked upon. A big one, stinking of beer, decay, and a perfume so sweet and sickly a ten-dollar whore would have turned it away. Dumb, too, that one. He could tell by the way it loped out of the store, lifting a battered baseball cap to the occupants as it shifted a brown sack of paperback books against its hip.

Paul smelled it, at least sixty feet away from where he stood at the doorway of the Indian Head Lounge, the hum and bustle of Highway 17 rumbling behind him, and Jake going on about some cousin who got one in Bayou Aux Carpes back in the day.

Jake told him his Daddy came up from Grand Bayou with the rest of the Plaquemines wolves to hunt. Who the fuck needs cell phones when you've got pack telepathy, yo? They roasted that leech, just like their _Mi'kmag_ tribe ancestors did over four hundred years before them: the head on one pike, the body on another.

As Paul saw Emmett Cullen, got a good whiff of his vamp stench, the lies and half-truths of the past days lost meaning, even lost their place in his memory. He understood at that moment he was a weapon, that the events of the past three days had only brought together plans that were hatched over a thousand years ago, and that he was merely a means to an end.

He never felt part of anything. Even his own odd mix of features that spoke of deltas, Mekong and Mississippi, his own skin was a stranger to him.

Since it happened, since she was there and then gone, his own mind, too, became foreign to him. Novenas and incense, sounds and smells once the closest he'd been to comfort, peace, and God… they buzzed and crackled in his ears and nose.

_Too heavy, too many words, too much smell. Too many voices called to him but brought no face to mind as they tumbled through Paul's head. _

His second cousin, a man he did not remember existed, had arrived at the tiny shotgun house in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana that he occupied with his mother, Thien, and sister, Ameline, just two days past. _Maman _knew him, even expected him.

Daddy - _Thầy Paul_ as _Maman_ called him– had told her his family's stories at night through the iron-barred gates surrounding the embassy in Saigon; he was locked in, she was locked out. When he had left Saigon, he was among the last Marines to go. A burly man had lifted _Maman_ from her _Grand-Mere's_ arms, delivered her to Daddy's waiting ones, and they'd flown away.

When Paul came to Charleston, he discovered the truth. Daddy wasn't human; only something close to it.

**Louisiana, 1997**

From the time he was a knee baby, when _Maman_ had told her little boy Paul the story, he'd imagined his father with his ruddy skin and hawk's beak nose putting little _Maman_ on the back of a great silver bird he'd snatched from _nghĩ r__ằ__ng nh__ữ__ng đám mây bay xa h__ơ__n_ –the place beyond the clouds – and taking them far away from the bad man named Charlie. They lived in a castle on stilts that rose proud from the marsh and looked out over a great placid ocean, a full company of alle-gawtors as their sentries.

When his child's imagination gave way to an adult's knowledge, Paul understood the silver bird was really a helicopter called a Huey, the bad man Charlie was Viet Cong, and an agent called Orange took Daddy away. It gave him the cancer that ate his liver and turned his lungs into the spongy black-spotted gunk he spat out as he shook and coughed. He had refused to go up to the Veteran's Hospital in New Orleans, said he wanted to die like a human in Grand Bayou, not hooked up to some machine far away from the marsh that was his home.

_Maman,A'hn Qui Thien_, she'd been a girl of sixteen, a kitchen maid, brought from Hué to Saigon with her grandmother, Uhen Trang, by men fleeing the once-Imperial city on the Perfume River. The NVA was not kind to the conquered as they poured into the cities abandoned by the South Vietnamese army. The lucky ones were shot on the spot or after trial as a spy. The unlucky went to reduction camps. Pol Pot in neighboring Cambodia was not the only conqueror determined to re-educate his people.

The unmarried brothers who employed _Maman_ and her _Grand-Mere_ had been professors at the esteemed Imperial University; from a family that knew such wealth that Uhen Trang and her little granddaughter A'hn Qui Thien couldn't even comprehend enough so they might dream of it. The two men could have escaped easily, made a new life in another country far from war-ravaged Vietnam, instead they pushed the elderly woman and her granddaughter on a transport, giving up their only means of escape.

Uhen Trang had been told later the two brothers were hung from the banyan tree that towered over their home's garden. They'd swung from nooses made of their intestines. The brother's names were lost to the days of terror and flight from the only home _Maman_ had known. She still said prayers for them, could still remember their faces. She and her grandmother had survived seven years in Saigon until that city fell, too, taking the country of Vietnam with it.

Unlike his cousins, Paul had not been threatened to good behavior by parents chuckling ironic warnings of the Laroup-Garou. _You go on now, cher, and clean dat room like Mama tell, or I'll send d'Lar-oop Garou to get you._ He'd been told he would swing from his own guts if he talked to those dirty swamp children who called themselves his cousins. _Maman_ had whispered it in his ear in _Việt ngữ_, her language. Daddy couldn't wrap his Creole tongue around _Maman's_ words, it was her own to use with–and against–Paul and his older sister, Ameline.

_"Now, mo garson_, don'nya be too mad with _Maman_," Daddy had told him as they glided around the narrow spots of silty soil that emptied from the Mississippi River into the land around them. Paul had been thrilled to go with Daddy as he checked the muskrat traps instead of sitting up in the house listening to the mother and sister argue in the sharp twangs of a country that would never be the same again.

"She don't let me go off with th' other boys," Paul had told his father as they searched a mud flat for one of their snares. "She say the Blaquieres an' Ulrys donno count, Daddy."

No answer had come to the seven-year-old's complaint, only the silence that tells a child his parent's attention is diverted elsewhere. After watching his father's broad, olive-drab-encased back for a time, Paul had picked his way through the sticky black mud to the elder Lambert's side.

"Daddy?" he'd said, his voice sounding small even over the gentle lapping of the tide coming in and distant shore birds.

"Go on back to do boat, _cher_." Daddy had answered quietly. All the men they knew had big proud voices to match their giant bodies. Quiet Daddy was not usual, not good. The boy had reached his father's side just in time to have heard him muttering words in the French-Creole he was not meant to understand. At his father's large feet had lain a dead alligator, not stiff and bloated from baking in the Louisiana sun but shriveled, the mottled hide compressed on the skeleton underneath.

"What happen to de alle-gawtor, Daddy?" Paul had whispered with the morbid fascination of a small child. He'd looked around his feet for a stick as his nostrils curled at a fancy-sweet scent on the air. "He look like someone took a straw and sucked da juice outa him."

"Go on back to do boat, Paul, like I done say." This time the words had been accompanied by a firm shove towards the shallow aluminum boat his father rowed among the marshes. "Go on, now. Listen to Daddy."

Paul trudged back to the place his father had run the small craft aground. As he'd clambered over the edge, he'd been surprised to see his father closing the distance between them in big strides, his face a mask of angry rumination that he'd never seen before, not even when _Maman_ talked about the bad man called Charlie.

That night Paul and Ameline slept in his parents' big bed with _Maman_, the three holding their rosaries, saying prayers over and over, as Daddy and his cousins had talked out in the front room. Eventually, Daddy called _Maman_ out to them.

"Billy will stay with y'all, _cher_. We'll take care of it."

_Maman_ had returned to bed, muttering in Vietnamese to her ivory beads. Sounds from behind the door told Paul they were not alone in their stilt-raised castle on the marsh. He'd fallen into his sleep reluctantly, dreaming of flashes of golden light, a black dog guarding their parents' bedroom door, and bonfires on the marshes.

When Daddy had passed soon after, the big men he called his pack came up to the front door, not dressed in suits and nice ties, but in old, musty-smelling clothes. Sad, bedraggled feathers had poked from their falls of inky hair and the cruel-looking spears they carried weren't shiny and bright like the painted, plastic sword Daddy brought Paul from one of his trips up to New Orleans to see one of his doctors. The swords Harry Clurierre, Old Sam Ulry, and the others carried were as tall as they were, with heavy metal points that had looked like the inside of a dragon's mouth. The wood was singed, worn with age–and use.

Billy Blaquiere had spoken to _Maman_ on the doorstep; she wouldn't let them in the house.

"Thien, I know you n'don care for us, but we the Wildman's _fonmie. _We take care our own, and we teach th' boy right."

Around his mother's tiny frame, Paul had been able to see the man, just as big and gentle-looking as Daddy, offer an envelope thick with bills.

"We go tomorrow. You don't find us. Leave us _alone_." _Maman_ had spat as she looked up what must have been close to two feet separating them. "I take care of my chil-ran, Billy Blaquiere."

"Leaving?" Ameline pushed past him, her black skirt whipping at Paul's face. "No! Not leaving, _Maman!"_

"Leaving, yes. I say goes, you have no say. Go sit and not dishonor Father, _Am-ah-enne_."

_Maman_ had pushed the envelope and Billy Blaquiere away with such force the sweat dampened paper shredded under her fingers, sending wrinkled bills cascading to the sun-bleached porch boards and the shell-littered scrub below.

"You go away," she'd repeated over Ameline's sobs.

That night Ameline disappeared into the Bayou.

**Louisiana 2005**

A woman named Katrina came into Paul's life twice, each time with life-altering consequences. She had blown in first as a storm, _nature's fury_ the man on _Maman's_ TV called it, and twisted the shoddy, mold-spotted, white clapboards from their little house as _Maman_ sat at Ameline's feet clutching her ivory rosary and muttering in her mother tongue. Paul was still enough of a boy to wonder if _Maman_ might blow away with the howling wind and enough of an angry young man to wish she would. Ameline, poor haunted Ameline, would have needed more than a gale to lift her from the Earth now. The boy had sat on the floor beside his sister's bed as the murky water seeped around his legs, struggling to keep his tears at bay. Three times already Paul had sent the parish officials away, telling them _Maman _wouldn't leave; they would ride the storm in their little house.

_Maman_ had evacuated twice before in her lifetime. She'd never been able to return, to repatriate herself. How could she have believed anything would be different the third time?

_Maman_ and Ameline would be arrested for child endangerment.

"Please, mister," Paul had mumbled over the rain, causing the deputy to lean down to the fifteen-year-old and tip a torrent of rain water from his cap and on to the boy's feet. Paul gulped at his shyness and spoke again. "I say please, Mister, do no make us leave here. My sis'ah, sir, she can no move too good."

"Where's your mama, boy?" the deputy growled, pushing his way past the slight boy.

"Back dahy…" he'd coughed, took in another breath of rain-heavy air, and tried to speak to the retreating form, only to hear his own words falter, then concede the struggle to be heard over the tropical deluge. He'd followed the deputy's footsteps, hands shoved deep into his pants pockets and shoulders drawn tight around his neck.

"Hoooo -ly…" At least this man had been kind enough to cut himself off with a low whistle through his teeth rather than express what was most likely morbid fascination combined with a valiant effort to face the room and the smell like a man.

"Mister, sir, please… _Maman_ no want no trouble, but Ameline, she can no get aroun' now like I say."

Paul had turned mournful eyes, brown as rich, silted earth, toward his sister who attempted to shift her ruined body from view. As if it were possible.

The night of her father's funeral, Ameline Lambert had been distraught over her mother's insistence that they were leaving Grand Bayou for Jefferson Parish the next day. Thien Lambert had refused to give further detail to her sixteen-year-old daughter, who'd sobbed as she tugged at the tiny Vietnamese woman's arm, nor to the giant man who had stood on the front porch of the Lambert home, speaking with such care and apparent sorrow at the loss of Big Paulie, as they called him.

When night closed over the deep bowl of bayou sky, the usually timid Lambert daughter had found her courage and went off in to the dark to find the boy she loved from afar. Ameline had watched Rémy Ulry for years from her required station at her mother Thien's side. The Lambert children had been kept close to their Maman, never permitted prolonged interaction with the tussle of young children who yipped and tumbled at play while their broad-shouldered fathers' laughter tolled across church halls and back yards. Ameline once was a mild-tempered, quiet girl, reared in the tradition of her mother's country and grown into an exotic beauty with the combination of her parents' globe-spanning ethnicities. Shy glances and dart-eyed smiles had been the only interaction between the cloistered girl and the imposing boy-man who glanced in her direction when Thein's attention was turned to her seven year-old-son.

To the present day Paul still found it difficult to remember his sister's smile, much less a time when Ameline might move about with freedom on limbs that could bear her. He did remember that evening with exact detail, although someone had whispered in his little boy ear that this was an important moment in the terrifying wash of the day his father was buried in the Lambert crypt.

Paul watched from his bedroom window as Ameline bounded down the shell-lined front walk, graceful as a gazelle with the moon shining on her shoulders and sheet of long black hair almost blue in the silvery light. Even though he was but a child of seven, Paul saw transformation on Sè Ameline's face; Daddy was gone and Maman was taking them from their home, but his sister finally shone with possibility.

Maman discovered her absence during her pre-dawn inventory of the house's occupants and possessions, waking Paul with a smart slap to his cheek, her shrill demands in her own language barely comprehensible to the sleepy child.

The men of Daddy's pack arrived before eight, looking grim. Billy Blaquiere held a quilt-encased form in his massive arms. As Paul peeked around his mother's waist at the bundle his father's cousin bore, he noticed dark stains shimmering with moisture on the weathered cotton.

_Blood._

"You go on back porch," Maman directed quietly, in a soft voice Paul had not heard from his mother since his father's illness upended their lives. "Quick, quick, cậu bé."

When he closed the door that separated the Lambert's kitchen and the Gulf-side screened porch, Paul discovered Jacob Blaquiere sitting on the shiny red two-wheeler that was his father's final gift from New Orleans.

"Hey ya, Ti-garson Paulie."

"Hey ya," Paul replied, flinching slightly at the odd sensation of using the standard form of address of his father's people; he was incapable of forming those salutations himself, forbidden by Maman by being familiar with the Lamberts' cousins.

The bigger boy rocked on his heels for a moment, came to a decision and faced Paul again.

"Why do your Mama no let you run aroun' with us?"

Paul glanced over his shoulder to the kitchen door, wary of his mother but desperate to interact with his cousin. He looked once more for surety, then stepped toward Jacob Blaquiere, every question in his seven-year old boy's heart tumbling out in one breath. This would be his only chance to understand.

"Maman say you all bad, that you all was borned damned to the devil with demon blood. Maman say bad things happen in the wood, and our Daddies do it because the demon make them. Maman say if I say my prayer and stay with her the demon won't get me, too."

Jacob looked past his cousin to confirm their privacy, and stepped closer to Paul.

"No, no, cousin. The pack, they fight the demon and keep us safe." He had leaned toward Paul's ear, his eyes glinting with excitement over his secret knowledge and the opportunity to share it with his younger cousin. "If my Daddy not been there last night, the sookie-yant, he would have got your Sè Ameline, too. It got Remy Ulry before he could turn."

Before Paul could question Jacob further, a deep male voice came from behind them.

"Let's go on home, now, Jake."

The two boys looked at each other reluctantly, Jacob enjoying the sensation of holding an audience rapt; Paul almost buzzing at the prospect of understanding so many family secrets.

"Jacob, now. Say Adyeu to cousin Ti-garson Paulie."

Jacob scampered to his father's side and, as they moved toward Billy's ancient red pickup, nodded a good-bye.

"Wait, Mister, please," Paul whispered to the man who was sworn by his own father to look after the Lambert family. Billy Blaquiere turned to his pack-brother's son, a tight smile on his lips but going no further. He looked toward the house and then crouched in front of the child.

"What is it, _mo tchen chanchon?"_

"What happen to Remy Ulry, sir? Was it they sooki-yant?"

The man's face constricted, his jaw tensing.

"You don't need to worry about the soucouyant, yet. You run on to you Maman. Sister all better now."

In the weeks after Katrina in late summer of 2005, _Maman's_ devotion to her rosary had become even more intense. She'd attended every mass, installed graphic Sacred Heart illustrations on bare walls and tabletops, had assisted the brothers at chapel tirelessly.

She had also made a decision.

Maman's own flavor of religious belief was a unique one, not unlike the closely guarded gumbo recipes passed down and refined by generations of Louisiana families: a little of this, a little of that, simmer until the parts are barely discernible. Hardline pre-Vatican II Catholicism, Buddhist mysticism, and ancient superstition made for a strange _mise en place_, but _Maman_ was a devoted practitioner. She drew together the half-comprehended whispers her late husband put in her ear through the gate at the US Embassy in Saigon twenty years earlier, her own lifetime of war and terror, her grandmother's peasant beliefs, and stories of saints like St. Catherine of Siena. Because of her husband's family, all demon-possessed, her Paul had been led into the bayous and conducted acts of nighttime depravity which turned to the rot that blackened his body. Ameline had followed one of those demons from the delta, been returned to them but bore a face full of angry scars and an appetite no amount of food would fill. Thien herself had been cursed to live in a strange country, unable to care for her ancestors' tombs, without her man to look after her.

_Maman had decided Paul would save them all._

"No issue," she had told her bewildered son after a twelve hour day of scrubbing oily muck and mold from the walls in a parishioner's flood damaged home. "You will be priest. No more cursed blood."

After _Maman's_ edict intending him to the priesthood was handed down, Paul followed his mother diligently on her errands, served as altar boy at every mass. When the young parish priest, calling himself 'Brother Tim', had encouraged _Maman_ to let Paul arrive at his own decision regarding a vocation once he would have completed college, the Lambert mother and son had begun to travel from Barataria to Morrero, then Gretna, Bridge City and finally into New Orleans in search of a traditionalist congregation that would support _Maman's_ plans. Ameline stayed in her bed almost constantly, cocooned in layer upon layer of pulpy fat, slick with perspiration and unable to support her own scarred body on her bones. When not attending to her ravenous appetite, she dozed, frequently screaming for Remy Ulry and mumbling about a black haired woman with no eyes.

**Louisiana, 2009**

"Good afternoon, Paul," Father Tim said, mustering his warmest smile to cover his unease at Paul's daily arrival. The boy was unsettling and often the young priest wished for a streak of late-teenage rebellion to open up in him so that he might be rid of task of finding work for him.

"Father."

"I've just been sorting out some donations from the Anchorage, Alaska Diocese, of all places. Does your mother let you drive?"

"Yes, Father. For the market and Sister's medicine."

"Ah, well…" Tim handed Paul a set of keys for the church van. Surely this would occupy him for a few hours; maybe the boy would wander aimlessly a bit and enjoy a day of freedom. The cost of gas would be worth the relief of him. "I'd like you to load the church van with those boxes of donated clothing and canned food and take them to St. Ignatius down in Grand Bayou."

Paul hesitated, considering _Maman's_ reaction if he went back to the little town at the end of Plaquemines Parish. She would be furious, but even more so, he reasoned, if he disobeyed the priest. Nodding wordlessly, he took the keys and began to load the ancient white van.

He arrived late that afternoon at the small church, set up in a temporary building at the edge of a sandy strip of land. Paul found the doors of the corrugated steel building locked, and there was no response to his knock there or at the tiny mobile home that served as the church rectory. He unloaded the boxes of donations, left a note on the rectory door, and returned to the van, his task complete by the time evening shadows were stretching out over the church parking lot. As Paul started for the van, he paused, looking over his shoulder at his former home.

Father Tim's wish was granted. Paul pocketed the slim keyring and walked off down the narrow shoulder that separated road and marsh.

_"Hello."_

The shock of another voice behind him should have been startling, but the tone of it was so familiar Paul found himself relieved to hear it. He turned to the sound, more haunting melody than human voice, feeling the unusual sensation of a smile spreading across his face

_"Katrina?"_The name spilled across his lips as though he'd said it every day, thousands of times, in whispers and laughter. His logical mind warred with something more ephemeral, but just as real to him.

_Her_.

Paul stared, fascinated, at the shimmering woman before him. He knew her. The slanted angles of her face, the moody amber and rose scent floating from her white-blond hair, the particular pitch of her clarion voice, The air around her even resonated within him, drawing him into a cyclone of recognition and astonished but futile attempts to clutch at a reality that had never before felt comfortable.

This woman, however, made perfect sense.

_Essential. Katrina._

He stepped toward the woman, into the glittering, golden aura around her, and drew her against him. The heavy salt air from the gulf lifted her pale blond hair around them, swirling around their heads as his head bent toward hers, finding her lips waiting as though they had always been just beyond him, waiting for him to take the first step toward her.

_"You came back," she whispered and kissed him again._

In his short, isolated and sad life, through _Maman's_ roller-coaster moods and Ameline's slow drown in her own scarred flesh, Paul Lambert could remember few times of joy after his father's death. He had few happy memories after he, _Maman_ and Ameline stopped one final time at the crypt holding Paulie Lambert, the Wildman of Grand Bayou and seven times removed grandson of a Mi'kmaq warrior called _Etlintoq- Tápu_, paid their stoic respects, and drove north toward higher ground and away from the marshes the Lambert family had called home for centuries. However, the moment Katrina's luminescent hand touched his arm and her mouth fell against his, Paul was besieged with memories of other men who knew this same otherworldly woman, even sights and sounds his own father had never spoken of but Paul knew to be his. He knew he was bound to the woman whose skin glimmered and danced with refracted lilac and gold from the setting sun, and knew, without a doubt, there would be no other now that she had made herself known.

"I came _home_," he said, the sound clear and full, not the mumbled or stuttered boy's voice no one was meant to hear. Paul Lambert spoke in that moment as a man.

Her hands on his face and neck were gentle and so blessedly cool in the heavy, heated air, the voice that tickled the fine hair on his earlobe was more ethereal than the choir at the St. Louis cathedral in New Orleans. The Lambert men carried their own secret within the secret of their tribe: Katrina, whose origins they understood but refused to acknowledge, was as much a part of their history as the real soucouyant who terrorized the Dominican village where the Lamberts, Blaquieres, and Ulrys settled after their flight from Acadia. The flesh-eating witch was torn into pieces, her head separated from her body and burned, just as this pale woman, who now faced Paul Lambert, had instructed his eight times removed grandfather, Paul-Georges Lambert.

And, just as Paul-Georges promised his two friends Sebastien Ulry and Jean-Claude Blaquiere, the long-limbed white woman with hair the color of pearls did appear the night the soucouyant returned to their village to take another skin so she could hide her own revolting form. The witch cursed the three men while the fire ate her withered, pustule-scarred skin and turned her ill-shaped neck bones to lilac dust, it consumed the final words of her curse upon those three men with a gust of spark and ash flaming through her throat.

The men and their progeny would have fully turned into _je-rouges_-and indeed they were cursed to live as shapeshifting wolves, turning without warning and dependent on the proximity of vampire species like the soucouyant, but the hag's final spoken curse was silenced by the embers of her own burning bones ensuring the men would never drink from humans as the vampire did.

Right before the soucouyant's eyes bubbled into a spitting, hissing yolk, they found the face of Paul-Georges and glared at him, accusatory and full of fury.

_"She will be bound to you as you are to her," the blazing, dismembered head screeched over the crackle and sizzle of its own flesh "When your eighth son lies with her, Paul-Georges Lambert, my revenge will come." _

Paul heard this ancestral story, this race memory, without a word from Katrina, knew it within a second of her lips touching his. He saw, through Paul-Georges' eyes, the clawing, snarling soucouyant flailing as a pair of giant teeth impaled her and heard the unearthly screeches and howls as her limbs were rent from her trunk. Her torso fell with a sickening thud to the sandy ground as the head and spine ripped from it. As if he had seen it himself, Paul witnessed through Katrina's kiss the incorporeal backbone dancing in the orange firelight as it searched for the flesh that had contained it and the nerves at its command. The memories were so repulsive to Paul's sheltered mind, he sunk to his knees, whimpering like a frightened child even though he was now breaching manhood. He felt cool arms circling him, and the sensation of rising, then propulsion so sudden and impossibly quick his breath was forced from his lungs. As suddenly as they moved, they were still again, seated high over what felt and smelled to Paul like water.

He opened his eyes slowly, blinking himself back to the here and now, and glanced tentatively around them. Beyond Katrina's milky-white arms, still cradling him gently against her, were the sun-bleached skeletons of hundreds of cypress trees, glowing faintly in the silver light of the full moon.

_"Where…" he mumbled, shifting his body slightly so he could sit beside, not on, her._

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Katrina sighed as she clutched his hand. Below them an inky artery of black water lapped at the spindly roots of upturned trees as the marsh grass waved to and fro in the rising wind. Paul turned to her, awed.

"I can hear it all–the dolphin out past the jetty, that alligator what went in the marsh up to Venice," he said, incredulous. The small marsh town of Venice was over ten miles up the inter-coastal waterway. Paul looked back to Katrina, mesmerized at the sight of moonlight reflecting on her clear golden eyes. "What's happening to me?"

She crossed her long leg over him, threading her fingers through his silken ebony hair as she settled against his chest. Paul's body went rigid at the new sensations of breasts and female skin and a place he never allowed himself to think of so close to him.

"You'll be no offering to those holy men and their Church now." Katrina pushed herself closer to him, winding her legs around his waist as her tongue found the hollow under his jaw. "You're my eighth song, my _miláčik Pavla._ Come be a man with me."

Paul pushed at the gauzy fabric covering her thighs, determined not to think of _Maman_ and the curse she imagined her own son was dedicated to end. This stranger, with her mind as familiar as his own—her strong, cool, luscious body as close to foreign as possible-was all that mattered to him, was the first glint of joy and possibility in his eighteen years. He remembered Ameline as she darted down the path from their Grand Bayou house, determined to find her Remy and her escape.

"Show me," he told Katrina as he stilled his hands against the curve of her hips. Everything about her was perfect, filling him with answers to questions he never knew how to ask. She topped his hands with her own, a soft and inviting smile lifting her angelic features as she guided his fingers over the mounded fabric at the dip of her waist. Paul's hands went rigid as his fingers pushed aside the material covering the heavy curve of lush breasts and taut pebbled nipples, denying his sensitive fingertips contact with the cold, silky skin under them. Her head tilted slightly, causing her shimmering hair to spill over her shoulder and slide across his forearm, waking another part of his own body to her. The silvery strands dancing in the unsettled air called to him as much as the gleaming flesh under both his palms; was just as fascinating as the fringe of dark lashes over her crystalline eyes. He caught a skein, held it from him and let the pale blond hair, almost as silver as her skin under the moon, slide through his fingers. Katrina's eyes fluttered closed as her back arched and she began to hum an ancient tune from her mortal time, over a thousand years before.

In short, Paul Lambert was enchanted. What else could he do but fall under the spell of the succubus while she was just as entranced by him? They were bound together by her nature, the curse of a long-dead soucouyant, and the smell of his blood; thrice fixed to each other and intended for the other even beyond the material. Had he been part of the everyday world that moved past him, unaware of his presence, noticing only a quiet, awkward boy if he was noticed at all, Paul might have been fearful when Katrina looked down to his expectant face again and opened her eyes. The clear, reflective gold irises and almost iridescent white surrounding them were gone, replaced by nothing but black.

Paul's entire life had seemed something of a dream, as though he hadn't been entirely present in his own skin. The touch of the creature straddling him was the most absolute sensation he had experienced, the waves of something real and meant just for him too much a balm for the down-deep aches he never was permitted to acknowledge. He couldn't care less if he were damned, if he sent _Maman_ and even poor, tortured Ameline into an eternity in purgatory with him.

He wanted to feel. He _needed_ to feel Katrina.

"Inside," she whispered, more music than speech and circled her hips against him, and his own cock, utterly foreign to him when erect, sent a zinging pulse of energy down his thighs. Without any effort, she pushed herself from his lap, crouching above him, and they made quick work of the passed-down jeans his father once wore. The surface of Katrina's body sparked faintly when she settled against him, inching him into the chilled wet between her thighs. The restrained electrical current that rode over her frame danced in tiny, violet-blue pin-pricks of light as Paul shuddered and pressed his hips up toward hers. She splayed one hand behind them, across a weathered branch for balance, her other hand resting on the muscled curve of Paul's ass, guiding and lifting him into her.

Paul could barely gather a strand of logical thought to tether himself to the crash of very base and otherworldly sensations assaulting his mind. In particles of seconds he careened from physical feelings so intensely sublime they dangled him over the precipice of insanity to a serene surety that he was finally rooted to the existence he was created for. His own voice joined Katrina's, rising from deep within his chest and spilling out over the howling wind, urging her deeper while his hands clutched uselessly at the hardened flesh under his fingers. They rocked against each other with a familiarity etched into their mortal and immortal bones, sending the dead cypress under them swaying and cracking with their movement. Her hair coiled around them, lit in fragments by the storm blowing in from the Gulf behind her. Katrina's hand glided from his hip, following swells of muscle Paul had never noted on his own body, and came to rest on his shoulder. Her head dipped to his neck, and she dragged her nose over the skin there again and again.

_"Not… yet… no_," she moaned and threw her head back with an agonized whine. A bolt of lightning shot from the sky just offshore, illuminating a waterspout dancing across the churning gulf. Paul reached for her, drew her face back to his as he willed himself to look into the black pools where her eyes once were.

_"Yes. Make me like you."_

She stilled against him, a struggle apparent even in the predatory haze that transformed her eyes. Paul drew his fingers over her lower lip, followed with his tongue, and caught the deceptively soft-looking pillow of skin in his teeth.

_"Katrina, make me yours."_

She pulled him against her chilled skin, settling his head into her arm as she brushed her lips across his cheek and forehead.

_"I'm sorry, my sweet Paul. It won't hurt forever."_

She kissed him once again and moved toward his neck as she rocked his body against hers. Tiny drops of icy moisture dripped on his scalding skin, numbing it immediately where it fell. Another flash of lightning illuminated her shoulders and the curve of her cheek as it rose toward her temple and revealed a row of perfectly formed, glimmering white teeth. Paul could feel cold radiating over his own feverish skin as Katrina's mouth neared its intended mark, and he tensed his body, forgetting that she still held his cock inside her.

Instead of pressing, piercing against him, she was suddenly flying away with speed and force that made him dizzy to watch. He squinted into the wind, looking first toward the Gulf, then at the black marsh below him, trying to make sense of the instantaneous loss of her. He lifted his head to look over the marsh toward the open water once again and was met with the sight of another woman, completely obscured in shadow, seemingly hovering in front of him. He screamed, horrified, and lost his balance, tumbling several feet from the massive pieces of cypress driftwood and landed on a clump of marsh grass with a heavy thud.

Paul scrambled to right his jeans as he looked wildly to both sides and behind him for the creature. Once again she appeared without warning in front of him, this time lit by a break in the advancing storm clouds that revealed the full moon once again.

The woman in front of him was swathed in black: her clothing rising and flickering about in the gale, the long curtain of stick-straight hair a thousand times more satiny than his own and almost blue it was so inky. Her eyes lifted at the corners, much like his own, arching open to reveal icy, silvery irises punctuated with thin rods of cobalt blue that appeared to shift erratically.

_"Don't go anywhere. I'll be back for you,"_ she sing-songed to him as she drew a stinging line down the side of his face and immediately replaced her dagger-like nail with her tongue.

"Leave him alone, Tamara. He's mine," Katrina's voice called out over the swaying reeds and grass.

"Oh no, Katrina, dear. You're _both_ mine."

The creature sprang easily into the air, her body flipping several times before she came to rest over seventy feet from where she had just stood.

_"Come out, Katrina. We've been waiting a long time for this, you and I."_

A gust of wind and almost imperceptible wave of contact caught Paul's attention, insisting that he turn away from Tamara, who crouched as if she were an athlete ready to blast toward an invisible end zone or finish line, and eyed the expanse of salt marsh around her.

"Paul," Katrina was behind him, whispering very softly into his ear and at a speed that made her speech almost unintelligible. "When I jump over you, turn and run. Your chief is coming for you. Don't stop until you are home." She leaned toward him, readying for a kiss and stopped abruptly. "She touched you?"

Paul nodded, intuitively aware he should refrain from speaking as it might reveal their location.

_"Our hearing is slightly better, one of the few advantages we have over them. Tell the Chief she touched you. I don't smell blood, doesn't seem that she's broken your skin."_

Suddenly Katrina vaulted over Paul, positioning herself between the bewildered man and the other woman who landed at the same time.

"Go!" Katrina snarled as she pushed forward toward Tamara. "I'll find you, Paul," she called out over her shoulder.

A shrill laugh rang out over the intensifying storm and the velvety voice that made dread curl around Paul's stomach sang out once again.

_"Oh, Katrina, my old friend, not if I find him first."_

_"He's human, Tamara. Out of play. Your battle is with us, not them."_

"But, _Kate, _when I hurt him, I hurt you and that makes our game so much more thrilling." The lithe figure spun against the swamp's musk, stirring up its forbidding odor. "Besides, I would like to know, how goes it with your sister, _Irina_?"

Paul listened to the two women, mesmerized at the disembodied voices' taunts and the notion prickling at his spine that both beings were posturing, taking the others' measure in advance of a battle.

The wind shifted again and a slip of pale skin and hair streaked in front of him.

"Paul, I said run!" Katrina screamed as Tamara's form whistled toward him. Katrina extended her hand toward the path of her adversary's attack. When the dark-haired woman came nauseatingly close to Katrina, a sharp metallic crack punctuated the intense wind now barreling in from the open sea, followed by the heavy scent of ozone.

Paul took in a hurried look at his mate, and turned, wincing at the pain of physical separation from her. Behind him, another inhuman crack rang out over the marsh, followed by a wail.

At the Lambert home over forty miles away in Barataria, Ameline sat up from her sweat-soaked bed and began to scream. Paul heard it as if he were in the next room.

Because the voice was already in his head.

And the _thing_ that had attacked his sister, that had interrupted her innocent courtship with Remy so long ago, hadn't been the blood sucker of the bayou. _No._ It had been…Tamara.

Katrina was the answer to every question Paul had never realized. As he ran from her, his body aching at the loss of her presence, voices other than his own infiltrated his mind.

_"Run along, little pup. I'll find you once I've disposed of your bloody whore."_

_"Where is he?"_

_"He's on it, Jake, can you just shut your fucking mouth!"_

_"Billy, what the hell?"_

_"You boys just stay where you are."_

_"Did he fuck a leech?"_

_"Fucked a leech and lived?"_

The voices came with torrents of emotion that weren't his: somewhere far beyond the morass of dark soupy water and twining roots he staggered through, there was pacing, snorting, frustration at energy contained instead of unleashed. Then a harsh snarl in a higher pitch–a woman? _That _woman with the ice-gray eyes?–superseded the tumult of voices.

_Then silence. But wary, waiting, dreadful with quiet inertia._

With his mind stilled, Paul sensed his own altered perception of the world he sped through. Scents were stronger, bearing multiple layers of decaying vegetation, the excrement of small animals and rotting larger ones. He slipped further into the sound of his feet splashing through boggy earth, felt trees fall away as his shoulders connected with them. His breath cascaded across his chest, hot and moist, as his limbs pushed harder into the ground beneath him. His body felt powerful, expansive; it moved with speed and efficiency and grace like he'd never known. The sensation of his muscles contracting, propelling him forward, elongating, and drawing toward his center over and over was almost addictive. His lonely, constricted childhood fueled his exertion, the hurt condensing into anger and spilling over into a rage that boosted him into a harder, faster pace. There was no pause in disbelief at the kind of exertion he was suddenly capable of: it made perfect sense. He made sense. The world that barely existed for him could offer up no questions in this new state of existence.

He was hot breath and snarling, baying hugeness, pounding the earth, sending showers of rock and dirt in his wake, cracking asphalt as he crossed Barataria Boulevard. Crossing the vast Jean Laffite Preserve was little more than walking down to St. Joaquin's every afternoon to see Father Tim for his daily penance, clearing high privacy fences and block walls was accomplished with little more than minor exertion and a long glide through the air as his body pressed forward.

When he arrived at the little shotgun house he occupied with his mother and sister, the porch light was on, illuminating an ancient red truck that Paul noticed only as it bounced and swayed when he passed it. He snorted, frustrated, at the impediment and continued toward the door.

He was met by a very short man, clothed entirely in black, who bore a strong resemblance to the memory his father.

_"Whoa, there, boy."_ The man said as his hands reached up to Paul. "What do you say we walk this off, yeah?"

Paul followed the man in silence, still unable to shake the feeling that he was surrounded by other intensely interested voices listening closely. He twisted his head over his shoulders, looking for the others, then let out a frustrated yip.

_Yip?_

_"Alright, now, boy… take it slow, yeah?"_

_"Dude, wonder if he'll freak? Embry broke both of Billy's arms when we caught him."_

_"Jake, would you shut your stupid fucking snout before I rip it off your drooling face."_

_"Hey Alpha bitch, suck my –"_

_"JACOB!"_

_"Uh… sorry, Dad. And uh… you, too, Leah."_

_"Cocksucker."_

_"Paul… son… do you remember me?"_

Paul looked down at the man he'd just heard speak and realized his face had remained completely still. He looked further, expecting to see his own feet and saw nothing but hard packed ground.

_And paws. _

_"Here's the wind up… and the pitch… OW! Fuck, Leah!"_

He looked forward again, searching for the small man he'd followed to the ill-kept playground and found nothing but a furry black dog staring at him.

_Paws. Dog. Forty miles, minutes._

Realization and rebuttal tumbled over him, calling up a mournful whine from deep in his chest. The animal before him padded to him, panting easily.

"I'm sorry, son. When you Daddy pass, you was too young to know."

_Did that dog just talk to me?_

_"Try wolf, noob."_

The next fourteen hours passed in a long blur of voices, heightened sensory input, and overwhelming, almost incessant hunger. When he wasn't eating or draining bottle after bottle of Gatorade, Paul was pressed against the passenger door of Billy Blaquiere's-Billy Black he was now-truck, too stunned, heartbroken, and angry in turns to speak. He watched his father's cousin talking, taking in as much as possible until his mind dragged him away again, back to the tear-stained, scarred face of Ameline, his _Maman's_ lifeless stare as she turned her back to him, refusing to say good-bye and most of all, his Katrina, smiling up at him as she turned the air around her into glinting lavender and gold.

_His Katrina_; a vampire. A succubus, designed to seduce and kill.

_Not his, never his Katrina._

**South Carolina, 2009**

Billy swung the truck into a deserted parking lot off of Highway 17, slotting the Chevy between a modified Honda and a gleaming black '68 Camaro.

"Well, then," he said aloud, grinning as he nodded encouragingly. "Welcome to Charleston, yeah?"

_"Welcome to the den, little pup. I'm watching…"_

"Did you hear something? Someone else?" Billy asked as he closed the driver's side door. Paul shoved his hands deep in his pockets, rocking back on his heels.

"Pardon, sir?"

"Just now," the older man repeated. "Did you hear another wolf?"

"Oh, no. No sir."

They were parked behind a one story block building capped with faded orange, faux shingles and, based on the warped and graying particle board over the windows, abandoned for some time.

The wooden-covered door swung open and several young men and a woman, all dressed in cut-off jeans and black t-shirts, emerged. Paul froze, immobile, at the sight of them laughing, shoving each other, their lips stretched into wide smiles as he was mentally included in the non-verbal horseplay. The loudest, and biggest, of the group was also one of the youngest. He stepped to Billy first, giving him a one-armed hug, then to Paul.

"Hey ya, _Ti-garson Paulie."_

_Jacob Black._

This time Paul understood how to respond.

"Hey ya, _Ti-garson Billy."_

The interchange was followed with a quieter round of 'Hey ya, cousin'.

"Come on, in, yeah?" Jacob said to him, standing aside.

Inside the Indian Head Bar and Lounge was a complete contrast to the dilapidated outside. Dim lights highlighted a pool table, bar stools, and several arcade-style video games. The distinct thudding bass of a hip hop song droned over the labored hum of six window-mounted air conditioners. Atop the gleaming bar sat at least twenty pizzas, flanked with line after line of two liter bottles of soft drinks.

Jacob punched him heartily, a wide grin stretching across his face.

"Hope you like pizza, G. Grab a pie and come meet the family."

_Mighty cooty fiyo - hey la hey, hey la hey_

_Mighty cooty fiii-yo hey la hey, hey la hey_

Paul was seated beside Billy Black, watching warily as the people he now called family moved around him. The hip hop music from earlier had been replaced with tambourines and a small shell-covered drum.

This was what the family referred to as 'practice'. Based on the odd assortment of items arranged on the table before him, Paul suspected 'practice' actually meant 'ritual'. Given his position at the right side of the pack's 'Big Chief', Paul also suspected 'practice' included some manner of initiation.

_I've got a Big Chief, Big Chief, Big Chief of the Nation  
Wild, wild creation…_

The voices of the pack became louder, the percussive beats and rattles more erratic. Billy moved in front of him, clutching a black bag in his hand and also singing.

_Mighty cooty fiyo - hey la hey, hey la hey_

_Mighty cooty fiii-yo hey la hey, hey la hey_

Billy thrust his hand into the bag, withdrawing a writhing black cottonmouth snake. Before Paul could move, Billy had plunged the animal against Paul's skin. As the snake's venom spread through his body, the singing and music increased in intensity, becoming frenetic and chant-like.

_Here come da Wildman, da Wildman._

Paul fell from the chair, screaming in agony at the fire spreading across his shoulder and into his hand. Pain more intense than any he had known drew his knees under him, made him press his head against the cold linoleum as his screams echoed back to him in the tiny space between floor and mouth. Hands grasped his arms, sending another pulse of scalding venom through his muscle and tendon, and he was seated again, this time with the weight of others' hands securing him to his chair.

_He won't bow down, down on the ground_

_No on no dirty ground  
Oh how I love to hear him call Indian Red_

As the torturous escalation of pain reached its apex, Paul felt something stirring deep within him, at every part of his body that seemed to gather and move toward his injured shoulder. Waves of heat radiated through him, making his teeth clatter wildly as perspiration poured in thick rivulets from his scalp.

_"Dey go, cousin! Dey go!" Jacob Black shouted from somewhere behind him. "Here come da Wildman, yeah!"_

The room erupted in cheers. A smaller hand cupped his cheek; Paul opened his eyes to find the woman he'd heard called Leah crouching in front of him.

_"Push it back,"_ she directed silently. Paul focused on her eyes that blazed intensely as she blinked at cascades of her own perspiration rolling down the bridge of her nose and dripping from her eyebrows. _"We got you, brother."_

_Mighty cooty fiyo - hey la hey, hey la hey_

_Mighty cooty fiii-yo hey la hey, hey la hey_

The chant seemed to be pulling him along, he could feel the rhythm in his bones urging him to repel the filthy venom infiltrating his body. Paul snarled, his lip curling as he ground his teeth and snorted along with Leah.

_"Go on now, Paul." Even her voice in his head was low, sensuous. _

They shared a vision of oily black sludge moving toward the twin wounds where the cottonmouth's fangs punctured Paul's skin. Both pairs of eyes traveled to his arm just as the very fluid they imagined gurgled from Paul's body and tumbled in a clotted ooze across his tawny skin. Jacob jumped from behind them into the center of the circle, holding the limp snake over his head. He called out, head thrown back, white teeth flashing in the fluorescent light.

_"Mighty cooty fiiiiiii yoooo! The Wildman in da house!"_

Paul gasped for breath, smiling with a mixture of relief and exhaustion. He stood, threw back his own head, and answered the pack with his own call.

_"Mighty cooty fiyo - hey la hey, hey la hey! Mighty cooty fiii-yo hey la hey, hey la hey,"_ Paul sang, his arm thrust toward the ceiling, pumping his fist in time with the chant. A chorus of howls met him and the pack drew in close, jumping in time and chanting.

_Yeah, we get dem leech, we roast him dead._

_We love it when you call us Indian Red!_

_Mighty cooty fiyo - hey la hey, hey la hey_

_Mighty cooty fiii-yo hey la hey, hey la hey_

Paul felt hands on him once again, pushing him into the center of the bouncing men. It was Leah, flanked by Billy. She carried a ragged bag, little more than a beggar's purse, embroidered with odd symbols that looked like hieroglyphics. As the throng of men continued to jump and howl, she thrust her fingers in the bag and withdrew a pinch of grayish lilac dust, raised her fingers to her mouth, and blew the powder in Paul's face.

The stench was nauseating; sweet like dimestore lilac air freshener covering putrid, long-term decay. Paul choked on his own bile, even as fury boiled over inside him. He knew he would never be able to dislodge that smell from his memory; it occupied the same part of his brain as another, more cherished scent.

And she was one of them. His Katrina. And they were bound… cursed?

Imprinted, brother.

Leah nodded to him, drawing him away from the celebration still raging around them.

"We never know when… or why. We'll think on it with Billy, _cher._ Everything that has a beginning has an end."

"Let's go up to Cuckold Point for a run, bros!" Jake shouted over the din. The pack made for the front door, their chant giving way to laughter and slapping hands.

"And sister, Fido." Leah called to the hulking boy.

Paul laughed a little at the two, already enjoying what seemed to be an unending verbal war between them.

_"That's my good pup, I'm watching you, Paul. I've waited for you too long not to use you well and take my revenge on them all."_

As he stepped from the Indian Head Bar and Lounge, shivering at the other voice that occupied his head, he realized he was no more brother to these men than to the large man stepping from Miss Mamie's Literary Treasures across the empty expanse of asphalt. He froze, sniffing the air and before he was aware it was happening, a full-throated howl escaped from him.

_A fucking leech._

"Whoa, dude!" Jake relayed instantaneously. Paul could feel him closing in behind, taking up a rear position. The huge vampire snorted at the same time, nostrils flaring slightly. The brown bag of books tumbled from his grasp, sending a shower of yellowed paper into the air like a flock of geese. Even from seventy-some feet away, Paul could see the bloodsucker's eyes shade over, going from clear amber yellow to black. As he began to crouch, another leech, sinewy but radiating with menace, swung from the driver's seat of a large truck resting on a lift kit, and slung himself easily over the hood, dropping beside his beastly companion.

"C'mon, _boy_," the larger of the two snarled as he twisted the bill of his threadbare baseball cap around his head.

"Watch who you call boy, _son_," Paul retorted in a voice he'd never used before.

"Hey, shit-for-brains, what the Christly fuck do you think you're doing?" said the lean, wild haired death-dealer as his hand connected with the back of the brute's head with a bone-jarring thwack. "Do you want to get your ass turned into a fucking chew toy, Bubba? Much as I'd enjoy a little dog fightin' m'self, _am I right, Jake?_" the vamp-in-charge stopped to holler over to Jacob, who grinned and agreed, "but we ain't brawlin' on the N'awlins for real, Bubba."

Jake stepped around Paul, blocking his view of the still-threatening vampire called… _Bubba_?

"Heeey, where you at, Ed?" Jake threw up a hand, saluting slightly.

"That's Eddie to you, _Shit-zu_." The two shared a laugh and the red-capped immortal turned toward his companion. "Get in the fuckin' truck, Emma."

Bubba stood slowly and spat a fair amount of venom at his feet, eyes turning again to gold and never leaving Paul's.

_"I'll let you have him when the time comes," Tamara's voice echoed in Paul's head again. _

Paul shoved his hands in his pockets and followed his cousin. For the time, he would live with the pack of shapeshifters, even learn their ways.

But even he couldn't guess where his future would land him; he'd only just unearthed his past.

_And who would find him first?_

Tamara, the wolf who wanted him as warrior, or Katrina.

_Katrina._

His heart felt squeezed when he remembered their sex… _their bond._

_Katrina, his mate, threaded through his bones; an immortal enemy._

Without the woman who would use him, without the vampire who would be his, away from his mother and his sister, Paul was displaced…again.

Would he betray, when the time came?

_This place, just like the others, was not home._

_

* * *

_

~~Sensing some new fuckery foot? _Good_~~

Please make sure to put those fingers to the keys for winterstale; she undertook this with her whole heart, dove into research, created a past and more than one wonderfully wrought character you'll be seein' again in _Dead Confederates_. I ask you to check out her fic, _Garden._ And if you just need a little taste to start on my friend's dedicated Emmett-ability, please read her _Homecoming_ o/s.

Miss 'stale is up for some O'character awards and voting ends 12-14:

http : / originalcharacterawards. blogspot. com/2010/11/nominees. html

The next outtake, in two chapter's DC time, will be from me. So fuckin' get ready. Mindfuck of the highest order in store for y'all.

There's a new blog for Rebelward and his crew featuring all the outtakes in a very sexy, sassy fashion, a'course:

http : / rebelward . wordpress . com/

_And_, it all kicked off with a fucking melt-your-panties off Rebelward vid by ROBZSINGER! (live links are on my profile).

A lesson from winterstale:

Big Chief – the chief.

Queen of New Orleans – the lady most revered (from what I can tell after watching quite a few youtubes on the Indians)

SpyBoy – the lookout

Wildman – the protector of the chief. Another 'tribe' must speak to the Wildman before they can speak to the Chief. Thought this was a neat parallel to Emmett's role as protector.


	14. Iron Maiden

*kisskisskiss* to my betas, Vanessarae and Viola Cornuta, the most fuckawesome duo _ever_.

Disclaimer: All _blah-blah-copyrights-blah-blah _etc. don't belong to me.

~~This isn't going to make sense at all if you haven't read two important Dead Confederate outtakes, _Crucible_ and _Indian Red. _And here's a warning: Don't turn out the lights ;)~~

Song (thanks Q!):

_S.O.S., _Apocalyptica

.com/watch?v=qFZ9e4wx1H8

* * *

**Rebelward Without a Cause**

**Iron Maiden**

Three hundred and seventy-two years.

Static.

Revolving around myself.

Three _hundred _and seventy-two years, and I was still here, exiled.

I shed no more tears, though unlike my half-brothers, I was now able to do so.

I'd been waiting; _I'd been watching._

For that specific alignment of man to furry beast to imprinted vampire, of planets and supernatural worlds.

The Lunar Eclipse on axis with the Summer Solstice.

The first go round, in 1638, I'd been reviled by my brother Aro because of my children… _the immortal ones._

The twenty-first of June, two thousand and ten, I would be reunited with my kin.

_My long banishment ended._

_~~ll~~_

"Come. My darling pet… I can smell thy musky pelt." I lifted one hand to beckon the sleek black animal to me, "Do not wait out in the cold night of the plains."

Largely wet huffs and deep smoldering snorts, and the elegance of her pads sifting across the dim marbled floor, her approach caused a vibration through the rest of the _vârcolac__._ "Settle now, my loves. It is only your sister, returned from the Americas."

Light yips were muffled under paws as they continued their dreamless sleep in heaping piles around the large room whose walls were carved from the heraldic insides of a long-dead Gryphon's cave. Formerly Assyria, where Babylon and Mesopotamia had spread around and stretched beyond me, I was locked up inside the depths of this mountain; the spoils of the fearsomely clawed, brightly-winged creature at my behest.

_Treasures to surround me, in my travesty. _ The structure had been demolished and embellished as befitted a Queen of the very Damned. Luxurious fabrics, the richest adornments, columns and silver and gemstones and gold beyond count. _But no windows_. And no escape from this craggy garrison. Protected from daylight and sequestered from civilization through unapproachable terrain and the harshest weather of both extremes.

"_Mmmm,_" I worked my fingers through her luscious, jet fur. Long, silken waves brushed my hand and shadowed the royal jewels whose heavy weight spilled in prismatic shatters when the tall, soot-black tapers' light flickered over me. Upon her haunches at my feet, my own _pricolici_ princess soiled the midnight opulence of my lace-bedecked gown with her panting, but I cared not.

_She had saved my life._

The moon was in them; it worked upon their long, muscled bodies as it had ever done from times before even I had known the earth. My beloved werewolves walked upright in human form for most of their lives, yet I adored them most as they were now. Wonderful, gargantuan Goliaths who would battle for me.

That glossy celestial orb that called the tides of the ocean, the currents of their bodies, was also in me. But being born as I was—a vampyre—it altered my essence in such a way that I myself could no longer see the day's light, for to do so would mean my death.

Not an instant succumbing to its mercurial burn; instead my demise would slowly infect me from inside… a scorching virus whose destructive path would wander languorously from the very least cardinal of my appendages, thence to my minor organs, lastly to my brain… _after three or more days of agonizing affliction._

Relying upon my hell-borne hounds, I had eventually discovered the cipher to end my nightmarish existence in exile from the empire that belonged to me, from the ramparts I used to stroll about in unconcerned proprietorship.

I swept her gruff aside to look at her bared canines. The whites of her eyes were bleak and twisted over by diamond irises that knotted backwards into carnelian when I asked, "How fare your far-off brethren?"

Redolent of fire and ash, the sodden path of her incandescently wet breath steamed from wide, damp blackened nostrils and lolling tongue.

Her coat shook, and the timber wolf worked her way across the tiles, clacking her elongated sabers to the white stone.

Hackles risen, she returned and snuffed at my hand, her grim snout raised heavenward, cursing the Moon's blight.

The meaty contortions of Tamara's feral face were telling.

Her Paul had been spelled upon, as was portended.

I grabbed under her stout neck, purchased my fingers to her scruff, pressed our faces together, monster to mongrel, "And dear Katrina?"

The snorts of her exhalations were stallion-like. Displeasure had her back arched and her enlarged paws kneading the woven rug under my feet.

"I love how much you detest the succubus." Cumbersomely, I kneeled beside my heeled pet."_It makes me thirsty for more and more blood, my beautiful bitch._"

Snarls ripped from within her, harvesting the night.

"Hush, yes, I know, _I know_," I patted her flank, uncurled her quadruped claws. "Paul is to be yours… _yes_.

"But they _must_ imprint for our bedlam to come into being."

Her howl mirrored all the spines of lances shoved into the enemy's throat at battle! Her neck craned upwards, and her sinews were trapped amidst the long, unending, gluttonous growl exiting the narrowed aperture of her throat.

Enraptured, _hungry,_ I haughtily stroked the quiver-shakes that threatened to rip her apart.

_Paul and Katrina had mated. _

I, too, trembled with ferocity to be set free from the musty cell, from the chains of non-light, from the assassination that had been done me—_almost_—by my favored brother.

"Have they?" I attempted docility and softness and charm, yet my fangs bit out beyond my lips and my pronunciations ended with cobra-hisses. All my insouciance was shed like snakeskin. _To be this close._ I trebled with ferocity to be freed. _I trembled._

"Have they become one unto the other? Paul and Katarina? Lupen to valkyrie?"

_Unleashed, like my glorious vagr. To commit chaos and killing and death and destruction and…_my REIGN!

_Yes_, I was unutterably excited.

_~~ll~~_

The most atrocious act my brother, the Chosen One, had perpetuated against me was the unjust carnage of my children.

A Halfling in every sense, Seraphiel my dam, Zeboul my sire, I alone had been granted regeneration, through my womb.

Sent off to the deserts of Babylonia, I was to procreate with many, to ensure our line remained intact.

Even mated to Marcus, I had pined for my groveling lovers, each chosen from indelible heir-istocracy.

_Hypocrisy._

My garments ever undone, my arms gathering the males, my lips kissing, my love trounced and denounced as year after year I procreated in the name of my true liege. Zeboul.

His lineage was continued through me.

_But they were mine alone._

Only Aro knew the reason for my sequestering.

He confessed to Marcus.

Caius, that useless hindrance with the face of a donkey's ass, knew nothing.

Marcus brought himself to my gruesome birth chamber.

His strong grasp helped me through the pains of life-giving.

Each time I laid, _waiting_, Marcus stayed beside me.

He held me blameless while he railed against his own biological uselessness—the studs whose bodies serviced mine were bred solely for that purpose; unparalleled power, cunning and pulchritude were the precepts by which they were created, _for me_.

"_I would give you this!"_ Marcus's bellow blew fast and cold as a glacial gale.

"I know, my love."

I named and coddled and dandled and delighted in each babe; the effortlessness of maternal love replacing the pains of grueling labor that left me retching and robbed of my… _strength._

Sanity shattered each time, anew, when anonymous nursemaids carried the young away to a far-off settlement where they were to be raised by the hands of others as warriors for the future of our race.

One child per season.

The Immortal Children grew.

In the 1500s, Aro ordered my presence during his inaugural voyage to the New World.

In one of the southern states on a balmy night that was familiar with screams and splatters and screeching flesh and bone, hoofs flew and our nightmarish cadre coalesced into one haunting parade.

Our flags raised; the red an emblem of blood spilled, and more to be had.

My throat dried.

My cries extinguished into unheard screams; I had not prepared for this!

In front of me, my hundreds of children were tied to one another, and every child in each stage of life was bound to my neverending soul.

Spiritually, they begged me to save them from the surrounding blaze that jumped closer and closer until their skin turned into a reeking ooze. _My young, my children, my beauties!_

Aro gave no quarter.

I listened to their keening screams for all my centuries: _Mother! Mother! It burns! My skin, my face… My EYES! I cannot see you, Mother. Please, help us!_

I bridled my mare and implored. I grabbed my hair, the ground, and the ashes that fell around me smote me and took my race's fertility with them, into the mud of the earth.

My throat too tight to speak, my legs incapable of holding me upright, I'd crawled towards Aro over the patchy scorched ground, _"Were we such a threat?"_

He ignored me, but to sneer, "This is how it should be, sister mine… _you, on your knees before me._"

Ignobly, he scattered the ashen plumes that had been my offspring, even laughing a little.

_The massacre of my young was only the beginning._

_~~ll~~_

Another march.

_March._

Time had all but forgotten me.

My children had been disintegrated by The Son.

I was interred by my bereavement.

Invisibly, I went about the castle; that which had happened was never mentioned, so my mourning was seen as mere insanity by all except Marcus, who vowed to avenge my loss.

Secrets passed liked silk veils among the servants, and I became nothing more than gossip for entertainment.

_Two things my brother__ and that tool of his, Caius, should have learned_.

Perhaps three, or four, more.

Caius believed he had wreaked havoc upon the wolves.

_He had not._

Caius thought me happily dim.

_Every time he turned his back to take up a new plaything, I mocked him._

_I was never that__ canonized female they took me for._

Aro overestimated the laws of the firstborn.

_Fool. It was about to bite him in the arse._

By sororicide, they thought I was dead.

It had happened as such not much more than a century after the razing of my young ones.

Unto a European village whose citizens were thick as timbers; our brigands rounded up the peasants, making them circuit to the drumbeat of our steeds' bass bruises o'er soil.

_Ignorant humans._

I followed a Siberian bear of a man… his only trespass was that he recognized our forces.

Craving the jump of his vein between my teeth, I'd lost all but my huntress' instincts until it was too late.

"_Because you harbored your children, because you created from your womb… because you still prefer the love of Marcus in lieu of allegiance to me… you will die now, Sister."_

Against my throat, Aro had gurgled, tackling me and taking me utterly by surprise.

His hands tilted my neck to an awkward angle so that he might shear my throat from my torso.

My venom was rain.

_It ran._

It sizzled his face and acidly cratered the sod 'neath me.

And as Aro's teeth took apart my neck, and jets of my life squirted up to the night, my head departed, leaving my body to collapse into a sinkhole that covered me over.

_Betrayed._

What found me next, my head severed free, aflame from without, my mind yet alive, were heavy treads unlike my own kind.

Snorts and shuffles and thick, rasping licks across my dismembered flesh, claws shredding my deathly shroud.

There were not shouts but earth-shattering growls puncturing the grabbing of darkness.

Saliva—great swathes of slimy sputum—took what was torn apart and mended it back together. Then a great throat came 'neath my teeth and renewed immortality took me over. The hanks of hair were parted by my tongue, the sinews of wolfish flesh sundered by my bite, the river of red ran in giant gulps from a thoroughly powerful anodyne vein pumping occult antidote into me.

_Tamara._

The radial burst of beasts surrounding us gathered closer. Each lycan offering his or her place, tendering their race's own majestic blood to me.

Binding us.

_Changing me._

The intervening nights that surpassed my intravenous cure made me know my novel hex: Fangs to teeth. Night to light. Feast to famishment. _And centuries more waiting._

A simple feint of the Furies, my mother had watched o'er me. Her heiress, I was kept alive by her watchful eye that brought werewolf to vampire in a most unlikely fellowship.

Escaping Aro's death knell with my lycanthropes' blood inside me, I too watched from afar.

I sneered, _they were so civilized now._

Battles were warned about in advance.

Subterfuge and palace intrigue had given way to a sprightly court o'er which Aro still opined.

_The abhorrent swine._

They would never see me coming.

I'd made good and nice and played the part of princess, and what had that gained me? _ME!_ The woman who should be Queen?

Death, by my own brother's hand.

Now, every test of dishonor would fall far short of my undertakings.

Sister, lover, the giver of undead life.

Made anew.

_Beware the mother whose children had been murdered before her very eyes._

_~~ll~~_

Imagine my derision, the very opposite of pleasure, upon learning an American upstart by the plebeian name of Bella Swan was being groomed to take my imperial place.

_Usurper!_

Handpicked by the messengers, sought out by the bestial, refashioned in half… _I would neither be wasted nor waylaid._

_Her_ fate was sealed as soon as the Volterra coup was put into action.

I did see their mistake clearly, but that was no excuse: the riddle had been told and told and told again until it was mangled so far beyond its origination anyone could make of it what they would.

_**Cullen~Swan~Volturi**_

_No._

On vellum, in an ancient leather bound tome, the calligraphy had leached from the pages like faded watercolors.

_**Valkyrie~halfbreed~Volturi**_

Yes, I could understand how they'd misinterpreted the message from devils and deities alike, but I would not stand for this deliverance.

They assumed, _wrongly_, that she was the successor.

That _she_ was presaged to supplant me.

_That I was dead._

As a vampire, a mixed breed, one of the firstborn amongst the Volturi… _that was my fucking Castle!_

I swept my skirts aside, the hooping nightingale fabric a curtain over my legs and down my arms. My bosom all but bared beneath the stricture of whalebone and ribbons cinching me in.

Could I have breathed, I would have splintered my carapace apart.

Could I have walked during the day, I would have rolled across the land like a tornado; leaving nothing more than dust and desert and cremations behind.

From this continent to hers.

But I was content, for a minute.

Tamara's strapping chest trapped my feet and ceased my pacing.

"Sleep, my dear one."

But for the voodoo, I would have gone more than maddened by now.

My sister of the southernmost realms had been sent to a jagged end; her body bombed from Earth to Hell like an arrow.

With a mystical connection, I'd seen her descent, the terror saddling her cheeks up to her eyes and lifting her skin and hair from her bones, the soucouyant gave me the answer to my long imprisonment, _"She will be bound to you as you are to her, and when the Lamberts' eighth son lies with her, our revenge will come."_

Her reprisal was mine; the time and place and… _people_ preordained. Paul, Katrina. The loogaroo**.** Me. _Tamara._

Paul's past, our present, and my wrathful rising.

Now there was no mistaking my gravitational pull to this… _Bella._

I spat upon her name.

_Yes, _my lips curled back in a tight curve, my full mouth bared over the fangs I'd been presented with… unlike the others of my kind. A true daemon with the gift of creation… at the thought of the slight American girl who was to take _my_ throne.

The ignominy!

_I waited. _

I would not let her desecrate my path to Glory.

For I was daughter of Serpahiel and Zeboul.

Sister to Aro.

Mother of many, whom I would still exhume.

Keeper of wolves.

_Mate of Marcus._

_~~ll~~_

Smelling my male before he appeared, I saw the cave's entrance black out o'er his broad shoulders.

His curling jet locks sat upon his shoulders, calling my hands to braid, and pet and stroke.

Rightfully a braggart in our own hellish home, he swaggered to me; the arch of his cock thoroughly visible inside his deep, black leathers.

His muscular jaw opened over erotic snarls to be with me once more.

Stopping once, he ran his hands down Tamara's furry back, his eyes glowing at me.

All the other whelps whimpered and made a path of pelts for him to stalk between.

He had always played his part pristinely: lovelorn, lost, _comatose._

That feigned moroseness was left at the entrance.

For three days, each month, _three hundred years and more._

"Come to me, Marcus."

But instead of instead of obeying my order, he commanded a large human forward.

_My dinner._

Aroused, Marcus watched while I supped.

Readied himself.

Pounced on me before even the flowing blood had a chance to run dry.

He threw me down, parted my gown from breast to thigh and had his face betwixt my legs so quickly I straddled his shoulders; his craving for my taste causing my breasts to jar and my legs to shake with the swarthy brush of his tongue inside my sex.

_Insidious._

Lust.

Heavy, panting, _breathing_, groaning, Marcus's gorgeous lips found my stomach, my nipples, my neck, and lastly my mouth.

I lashed him to me; his pelvis, his ass, his back and cock…

I flipped him down to the floor and wantonly fucked his face, sat on his chin, rode his thighs and then knew the masterpiece of his erection deep inside of me.

My orgasm was a forceful thing that rode throughout my body until I was stunned and held frozen, mid-scream!

Undaunted, Marcus toppled me over to my back, pushed my knees to breasts, and my feet arched, my toes curled.

My nipples between his fingers were hard and pink and so very ready for his steady sucking.

Cum drizzled between us like hot drops of slick wax that never cooled.

My fangs furrowed against his neck.

I screamed in climax again; my hips to his hilt, my breasts pressed down under his hands and my legs held up and apart with his cock lashing into my cunt!

_Keening_, crowing, drowning, _dying…_

Drops of cum made warm entrails between my legs.

The slatternly splits in my gown had Marcus's hands all over my ripeness.

He righted himself to his elbows, gained his velvety satchel in his palm.

The rich red musk from our bodies put shame to all the cavern's incense; I went back to my meal: the mortal whose veins were still running like a stream, awaiting me.

Marcus's smile became a leer as I lapped up and down the thick flume leaking across my tongue with the man's throat casually tossed aside to fit my hungering fangs.

My lover lifted his groin and captured his cock in both fists.

_Panting for __Marcus_, I licked a fresh path up the other side of the neck… _then I bit him hard._

Viscous, volcanic streams screamed from his artery.

Marcus came again, in his own hands.

My thighs were wet and slick.

My mouth an eel's suction.

My sex swollen.

Dropping the human, I needn't turn nor ask; Marcus was immediately at me, his forearms holding me up against the clammy cave wall.

I wallowed in his scent, his pounding rhythm.

I reveled in his long erection, steadily lunging into me, in the stern sensuality of his features, in the aching fucking that filled the chamber with moans and whispers and wet smacking noises.

Eventually, outside, that nemesis, _dawn, _dazzled.

Her dainty fingers pleading to be bitten off, knuckle by knuckle.

_But __Marcus was still with me. _

His thighs twined with mine.

The black of our tresses plaited together, our heads side-by-side.

The pillow of his bicep curled and released, just like his cock.

His lustrous mouth plucked at mine, "You are certain? You have decided?"

"Yes, my love."

"You will not let sleeping dogs lie?"

I trounced on top of him, dropped my sex over his cock, "No, I think not."

_Behind every spineless__, sister-killing son-of-a-bitch…_

_There was me._

_Didyme._

* * *

**Chapter Notes:**

I fudged a bit. The cosmic phenomenon I've referred to is actually the _Winter_ Solstice and Lunar Eclipse that we experienced in December 2010. I like to use extreme weather in my fics so most of them are set either in the dead of winter or the height of summer, and Dead Confederates is definitely a sweaty southern summer fic so I'm making it the Summer Solstice. And FYI, DC's is set in 2009, to give you a timeframe on what's going to happen (*coughs-sequel-coughs*).

A **vârcolac** in Romanian folklore may refer to several different figures. In some versions, a vârcolac is a wolf demon, which, like the Norse Hati and Sköll, occasionally swallows the moon and the sun, and is thus responsible for eclipses. It may also refer to a wizard that has the power to turn into a wolf for camouflage. This so-called vârcolac had magical powers that made him be feared by local men who thus called him a demon.

**Go to ****rebelward . wordpress . com /**

for your teasers, pics, vids, and the chapters in full living—or dead, as it were—color.

**And alert me, I've got an o/s for funs coming up…**

Cheers, Rie~


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